I'm going to have Debian installed on a client computer very soon, and before I take the plunge I want to go ahead and learn some of the basic commands a Debain user should know.

I've been running Mandrake on this machine as a dual boot, and have had fairly good success with it.

My main questions are, since you can use RPMs, why is it such a bad idea, and just how bad of an idea is it?

Also, what are some of the main commands someone should know to be able to start using Debian. As I said, I've been using Mandrake so I have SOME prior knowledge. I've done my own installs of Debian before on this machine (but I'm getting the other machine repaired and they're installing it with the repairs done), so installation won't be a problem, just configuring/getting programs etc I would need.

Last, how would I go about configuring a LAN on it? As I said also, it's going to be a client. I know on Mandrake you can just go through the wizard to do so, is there some type of wizard on Debian or is it all manual? Thanks in advance.

The only reason you can use RPMs is because the boneheads who made up the LSB (Linux Standard Base) decided to use the vastly inferior RPM package as the standard package. That's it.

The only command that's Debian specific that you need to get familiar with is apt-get, or if you prefer a much nicer way of doing things, aptitude (you'll have to apt-get it first).

As far as other usage specific questions, check here.

thanks for the reply. I had heard there were a few different commands that were Debian based, but wanted to get a few more opinions.

are there as many packages available that are .deb? It doesn't matter a whole lot, becuase most RPM's you find, have a tar.gz right beside them.

dpkg is another debian-specific tool you'll want to be familiar with, especially if you're using .debs. 'dpkg -i filename.deb' and you're done. Much easier than unpacking and installing tarballs.

One of the basic things is dselect. If you install woody it will ask you if you want to run tasksel and then dselect. Dselect will resolve all the dependencies for you. It's a PIA as far as the interface goes, but once you've got it down pat then most software installs are easy. You can search the debian web site for specific software packages to see if it's available via dselect or apt-get.

Also, unless you are running a server, I would upgrade to testing asap:

edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change everything 'stable' to 'testing'
type apt-get update
type apt-get dist-upgrade
type shutdown -r now


Also, here's a good link for general linux commands:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~smcpeak/unixsummary.txt

dselect bad, aptitude good

also ... why reboot?

I haven't used aptitude though I've heard good things about it. Rebooting is usually not (if ever?) necessary but it does give me a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that things won't break if the power goes off and I have to boot up again. Too many years of dealing with windows I guess <shrug>.

Rebooting is only really required on kernel updates ...