I'm making a serious effort to transition from Mandrake 10.1 to Debian. I have installed Sarge on a new Hard Drive and it is up and running.

Is there a utility in Debian equivalent to Mandrake's "Configure Your Computer" (Drakconf). This gathers a lot of the administration stuff in one, well laid out, menu system and frankly makes configuration a breeze. For example "Partitions" automatically detects all drives and partitions, displays them graphically, allows you to select what you want and writes fstab.

(I know I can do it the hard way but would prefer the other option.)

If that sort of stuff is important to you, I'd use a Debian-based distro instead of pure Debian. Maybe try Mepis, Xandros, or Ubuntu.

hi,
so the answer is, well ..... no.
you stopped using Mandrake, just try to get a little more knowledge
about linux now that you use debian ; don't go to a debian-based distro,
though, it is the same as in Mandrake.
this book is great : http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/15932...L-4GV796923290
cheers

Thanks for the replies. I'm perservering with Debian. (got the NVidia driver working, got all other drives mounted and installed firefox since the last post). However I had to ask the question. Would have felt silly if I'd done it all the hard way and then found out there was a tool.

I've never used "pure" Debian, although I have both Mepis and Ubuntu installed to see what they looked like.
I think there is a tool for doing all you want, but it's sitting on your side of the keyboard ....

It is not really that hard. You just have to figure out where the config file is and edit it with a text editor.

KDE and GNOME have some system configuration tools. Even if you don't use GNOME, you can still install the gnome-system-tools package that comes with these tools:
/usr/bin/network-admin
/usr/bin/time-admin
/usr/bin/boot-admin
/usr/bin/services-admin
/usr/bin/users-admin
/usr/bin/disks-admin
/usr/bin/shares-admin

You can also install the bum package that provides you with a tool for configuring services (it's like services-admin in gnome-system-tools, only better).

Some Debian packages have post-install configuration scripts and you can rerun them with "dpkg-reconfigure some_package" (where "some_package" is the package you want to reconfigure). There's also a GUI tool, gkdebconf, that allows you to run these scripts from a GUI frontend.

There's a package called wajig that you can install and it's supposed to be a frontend to several config tools. The wajig package also installs a GUI frontend "gjig".
http://www.togaware.com/wajig/

There are also loads of command-line tools, some Debian-specific and some not. When you learn more about your system, you'll almost never need a GUI tool. You just open a terminal window and edit some config files. Most of these files can be found under /etc , especially the files under /etc/default are worth checking out. And every installed package has additional information under /usr/share/doc . Also, most commands have a man page that is sometimes worth checking out.