Questions prior to Install

I'm ready to take that leap to Debian after a few years of Linux and BSD (RedHat 4.2 was the freshly released when I started; have recently used Gentoo and GNU/Darwin systems). I have a few questions for the crowd about Debian, especially for the mobile user.

1. I have a copy of The Very Verbose Debian 3.0 Installation Walkthrough and the additional notes by John Fry about Installing Debian on Dell Latitude CPi A366XT. Following either of these guides, are there any changes that should be adhered to with 3.0r2, specifically for for Dell Latitude CPi A400XT laptops (or laptops in general)? Google and other forums have been very unhelpful in this region, usually sticking with the NeoMagic NV256AV sound issues.

2. What, if any, difference of support with APM or ACPI is there with Debian? I know this mainly constitutes kernel support, but I just want to make sure I'm not going to suck my battery dry. Under SuSE, this laptop regularly sees 3.5-4 hours of battery on general usage, Gentoo almost 5 hours. Should I expect the same with Debian?

3. How successful has the crowd been with the 2.6-test kernels on Debian? While I know the kernel is THE kernel, numerous distros have customized "non vanilla" kernels included with their distros. AFAIK, Debian uses the vanilla kernel, right?

4. X, Window Managers and Desktop Environments: Are the freedesktop.org Enhancements available in apt packages? Gnome 2.4 from my understanding is in unstable, but with packages still being down, I'm not able to confirm. What about Enlightenment 0.16.6 (or E17, though I'm not hoping for a CVS apt build)?

5. How easy is it to build from source? This is the biggest issue I have with the numerous other distros out there (especially the RPM-based distros). Things just aren't where developers intend them to be and it's a pain having to maintain symbolic links. Do these kind of problems exist with Debian?

Other than that, I'm nabbing the Disc 1 ISO on Thursday when I'm back in the office again (I wouldn't dream of pulling an ISO on a GPRS connection!). Any thoughts and suggestions are more than welcome.

1. The debian installation manual from www.debian.org should be sufficient for most of the cases.

2. The acpi is not mature enough to work well; apm works fine for me. I would expect the same.

3. Debian patches the kernel (security patches, debian spesific bootup, etc), quite a lot indeed (not so enormous that they are not binary combatible as in RH, though). My brother has been using 2.6 -kernel series quite successfully; there have been some problems with pcmcia and wlan cards, some strange thermal events with acpi and random keyboard lockups occassionally (2-3 times a month)

4. Enligthemement 0.16.6-1, Gnome 2.4.

5. Build what from source? Arbitrary ordirary package (not kernel, X or openoffice.org)? Easy, just 'sudo apt-get build-dep foo', 'apt-get source foo', 'cd foo-xx.yy' and 'dpkg-buildpackage'. For X and the openoffice: same, thus you need a lot of space.
For kernel, you need few more steps, see http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/, especially the kernel section.

1. To add to the uselessness of what you find on the net, here is my Alsa config (/etc/modutils/alsa) for my CPi 300XT.
It's the Neomagic card but I can't make it work with drivers intended for this chip so I use the CS drivers instead.

But no, you should have no problems as long as your network card is supported.

2. If you upgrade to 2.4.22 or 2.4.23 you should have no problem.

3. As ToniT said, the Debian kernels are patched, but not so much as the RedHat ones. Plain vanilla kernels work well, and make sure you install the kernel-package package which helps a lot when it comes to compiling, installing and upgrading kernels.

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5. I find that Debian is one of the easiest distros to build local packages on. Download the source, unpack, configure...and if a package is missing just apt-get it. You can usually guess the package names pretty easily. Then compile and install.
Oh, and building debs isn't a hazzle either.


Håkan

Thank you much guys for the input. I feel a little more comfortable now with knowing that, while there might issues, they shouldn't be too much of a hassle to fool with.

hw-tph, thanks for the script - I'll definately be giving that a try as I've had some issues with the neomagic driver reguardless of distro.