Can I confirm with you whether Debian will support this Dell notebook?
http://www.dell.com/my/p/inspiron-15...iron-15r-n5110

What I am concerned is wifi and screen resolution, VGA driver.

Widget has already explained this to you (very nicely as well).

But I do have to say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. I find the more 'plain' debian desktops look better to me than the overly eye-candied up versions you might find in *buntu.

Damnit, I'm editing out pointless colour changes if I quote you from now on.....

Debian is normally lighter, has less stupid dependancies ('plymouth', a graphical boot animation/logger as a dependancy for mountall? Who the hell thought that insanity up?). It also got the advantage that you are not a beta tester an 'open source' desktop with a contributor agreement that allows canonical (a company based in a tax haven) to sell a closed source version.

Sort of.

If you compare 6.0 to the 'update' 6.0.2.1 then the update shoud have newer packages (though in most cases, the only difference will be bugfixes and/or security updates).

If you compare update 6.0.2.1 to the normal 6.0.2.1 there will be no difference.

The 'update' CDs/DVDs are made for updating debian without a net connection (or for people with really, really slow/unreliable connections)

Wifi, no idea, havent checked it. Should be possible in most cases, with varing amounts of stuffing around.

6.0.2.1 should support 'sandy bridge' graphics, if it doesnt you might have to get a newer xorg-xserver versionm from testing or sid.

In general Squeeze should support anything that Ubuntu 10.04 does on a hardware level. Ubuntu really does little to change things as set up by Debian. They do configure things differently and put some files in different places.

Their repos are easier to understand for the noob (this is a very good thing).

If you get the repos set up right and get the non-free stuff needed then you should have all the support you get under Ubuntu.

While the Debian free/non-free policy may seem radical to some (most?) there are folks that think them too liberal. The GNU foundation does not recognize them as a "free" OS. This is because they do make it possible for you to install, from repos on Debian servers, "official" or not.

Ubuntu has to have the medibuntu repo separate to keep their agreement with Debian.

The big problem with Ubuntu comes in with their silly dependencies that seem to make no sense what so ever (Plymouth as cascade mentioned is not just a depend of mountall).

If you look around you will find a thread in the Debian section here about gthumb. You can't install it on Gnome any more. Using aptitude you can break up the Gnome DE meta package so that you can install gthumb. There is no way in hell to remove plymouth from Ubuntu with out removing Ubuntu. Every thing, it seems, depends on it.

On the other hand, if you want that defective piece of crap on your Debian install it is available in the repo. If you don't want it you can easily remove it. Why did Ubuntu integrate it the way they did? There is no apparent good reason for it at all except that they do not want you, the owner of your box, to be able to control or configure it the way you may want to.

While the guy may be a little blunt I agree with Torvalds in that if you treat your users like idiots only idiots will use your system.

This may not have hit mainstream Ubuntu yet but their rank of testers is down to about 10 with experience and a bunch of folks that generally have not, even at the A3 stage, yet installed 11.10 on real hardware. Many long time testers for them, myself included, have very happily switched to Debian.

There is a drop in the number of users on the UFs. It is still a huge number but it is the experienced folks taking a walk. Support may not be suffering yet but it surely will.

I think that is the best reason for using Debian over Ubuntu. It most certainly is a good reason for using LQ over UFs. I have been a member here for about a week longer than over there. I can tell you that when I joined here the support was better, slightly, than there. The gap has widened a good bit. If you check the links to UFs threads posted here you will find that most are over a year old. This is a pretty good sign that they have some very large problems to work out and there is no sign that they even see the real problem at all.

It is going to be well after the release of the next LTS, 12.04, before they can even begin to correct these problems. The forum usage problem, according to them, is spam and the lack of a new theme.

The default theme here is the same as it was in 08. Usage is up here. Spam, in my experience over there, has never been a major problem.

They really need to start treating their users as if they were not naughty idiots when anybody disagrees with what Ubuntu is doing comes up.

The fanboys over there are pretty happy about what is going on. Anyone with any sense is looking elsewhere for support and many for a different OS. This may, eventually, be understood by Canonacle and Ubuntu. I, personally, hope it is in time.

can u tell me, debian and ubuntu, which one do u prefer? Why?

You really need to try to use standard English.

I thinks I already answered that question for you so I will let others argue that one out. That said, you are the one using the OS. This is Linux and the choice is all yours. Ubuntu may not like that but I do.

If you have as little as 8 gigs free you can do a / and /home install of Debian and try it out. Heck you may hate it. There is a learning curve to it coming from Ubuntu. It was not too bad for me as I got into multi-booting the first week I installed Linux (Ubuntu 8.04). Had Lenny on here for a long time, then Phat Debian (respin no longer in existence) based on Lenny.

Squeeze is quite a bit easier to work with than Lenny, at least for me, in a number of ways. Get your repos right (see "post your repos" sticky thread in this sub-forum) and you will not have much trouble.

The repos are the thing that Ubuntu has done a wonderful job on. That and an excess of eye candy.

Which is why I think that getting the newer xorg intel driver _may_ be needed, I recall there being issues with 'sandy bridge' intergrated video and 10.04. There probably are some isues with squeeze and sandy bridge video as well, but debian users tend to think and research a bit more than *buntu users. So they are more likely to avoid the problem, or just fix it themselves, not go onto forums and create 'why is my video stuffed' threads.

You may be right about that. I do not have trouble with video on my Squeeze installs but am using the fglrx-driver.

No problems with Testing or Sid either for that matter.

I have had less problems with video issues under Debian than I did under Ubuntu and that I do not understand. Has to be hardware related in some manner I would assume but can't see how. I am not complaining about it either.

My hardware seems to like Debian better, I like Debian better. The two of us just use Debian and forget Ubuntu.

Also do not need to deal with the threads you refer to.

Sandy bridge video, to put it bluntly, can be a PITA. It should be OK-ish with teh newer xorg drivers (and a new kernel wouldnt hurt either).

I've got my own opinion about why this could be the case- its a 2 part idea.

Everything in debian 'stable' versions have gone though testing/sid, and in some case experimental as well. Thats quite a bit of testing.

Ubuntu has at best 6 months of testing. Sure, its based on testing (for LTS versions) or sid (all other versions) but ubuntu almost always include the newest xorg version they can get, and quite often the newest ATI/AMD and nVidia drivers as well. BTW, the nestest xrog version is why ubuntu has had problems here and there with 96.XX and 173.XX drivers, a lot of the time those drivers do not support the newest version of xorg when ubuntu is released.

For example, with 11.04 ubuntu pacakged the 270.41.06 drivers-

http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/nvidia-current

Which is insane, they were only released on the 20th of april 2011. Sicen 11.04 got final release on 28th of april 2011, that means 8 days testing.

Have you tried Linux Mint Debian Edition? I've been using it for a couple of months now and must say it's pretty nice. I have nothing against Ubuntu, but I haven't used it for some years.

I did install the PPC Ubuntu on an old G3 iMac a few years ago and it installed without a hitch, everything worked out the box, which was a surprised to me.

And I do prefer Debian...

Just a thought!