Idiots guide to debian
 

Ok so I probably dont know what Im getting myself in for but Im considering Debian,
From what ive heard and read once its up its a breeze to use as most compatability isses dissapear with the complex install, however, how on earth do I get the correct information to install debian onto my system....

Are there third party apps that will give me every single piece of information I need when I install debian? or am I really screwed to teh point where I have to be anally retentive and become an anorak to know everything about my system

The installation isn't really that hard. Everybody is just complaining cause it looks like dos. The sarge installer is supposed to be better but it's still no mandrake or the like.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2016 is the guide I used to install debian woody when I was a newbie. Basically the only thing I really had to be careful with was the partitioning. It helps to have some idea about how it works and experience with fdisk is never wrong.

Woody is a bit old though and sarge is probably better to install (newer kernel and newer programs) but I don't know any guides for it. You don't have to know much about your system when installing debian but afterwards you might need to tinker a bit to get everything to work but not much more with other distros (except for maybe newbie distros like mandrake but those don't work right 100% always either)

Don't get yourself too psyched out about this. The major difference with Debian is that it is more a self build process as opposed to many of the popular distros like RedHat, FC and Mandrake. What I mean by this is that with the latter when you install them they give you a nice gui desktop straight off. This is fine for someone very new to this environment and is comparable to the M$ environment. The downside is they tend to be a bit slow because of all the clutter. Debian on the other hand merely installs the bare minimum to get to a command line and thereafter you are left to decide what you want.
I personally would recommend the new Sarge installer because it does a good job of handling the hardware side.
I recommend reading the documentation fairly carefully although it won't make a lot of sense initially but you will remember a lot when you start working with it. I also found this very useful guide on all sorts of things. Finally the sticky at the top of this section on what to do post installation.
Debian is a geat distro. It is fast (fastest I have used) and teaches you a lot about all sorts of things especially networking when you get into it.
Good luck and remember we are always here to "hold your hand" through the learning process.

Once you get through the basic system installation, which is much less painless with the sarge installer, 'tasksel' is run

Basically this just gives you options for what sort of system you want and automatically chooses all the packages for the options chosen.

After that, you can play about with dselect or aptitude or synaptic or even kpackage and explore just what is available and tweak your system to your hearts content (or hard drive size).