What's with the reinstalls??? Try a dist-upgrade next time.

You sound like a 3 year old who just learned a new word (dist-upgrade). There are lots of situations where a reinstall makes way more sense, especially with newbies who have recent new installations anyway.

Sounds like I just stepped on your ego, sorry about that.
The only situations where it makes more sense to reinstall is where things have been seriously broken and "one snag" sure doesn't meet that criteria.
If you want to run around propagating the windows-esque approach of reinstall, reinstall, reinstall go right ahead but don't get narcky with me just because I suggest something different.
The fact that the .deb system (and package QA) is so solid is one of the major reasons no other distro has tempted me anytime in the last 8 years.
Why not get newbies into the habit of fixing their systems rather than just swapping out their current problems for the new set that comes along with the reinstall?

A new install on newer hardware makes sense.

Etch net install kernel 2.6.18
Lenny install kernel 2.6.24
Lenny Daily / sid net install kernel 2.6.26

The version of the kernel used DURING install can have a rather large effect on what hardware the system can automatically detect and configure.

Doing a dist-upgrade from etch to Lenny will not auto-magically detect and configure hardware that wasn't detected properly during the original etch install.

Expecting a newbie to delve into configuration files, modprobe drivers, update kernels, to make things work. When they are struggling just to install Linux onto their system in the first place is a bit of a stretch. Let them get a working system up and running first by installing a newer version of the OS rather than having them pound their head against the wall because they can't get X running, their Ethernet isn't working, they have no sound.. That just sounds silly to me. It's MUCH faster to re-install on a new system and have everything or at the very least Much more hardware working out of the box.

Claiming theres never a reason to re-install is silly.

Maybe there's some confusion here,
by dist-upgrade I mean change your sources.list to your new desired release (lenny in this case) and upgrade away.
I had dist-upgrade in my head as "distribution upgrade" as that was what I recall being needed to push the major changes through. aptitude uses full-upgrade in dist-upgrade's place and I favour aptitude over apt-get these days.

The rest of your points are spurious... I made no such claims or expectations, his system is up and running, did you read the thread before typing all that?

Recommending a reinstall to fix a sound driver is silly.

Is this one of those "Only real men use linux" posts I've heard of? Sometimes you have to tailor your answer to what you perceive of the questioner and what his real needs are. In this case, the questioner was confused and just wanted a working system. He didn't want someone to tell him to pound on his chest, RTFMP, or anything else. I decided that the best thing, given his total situation was to recommend that he completely reinstall. He's happy. I'm happy. farslayer's happy. You're not though. Shame, that.

What are you on about???
Are your decisions beyond reproach?
Rather than assist them through a useful example (no risk, nothing to lose mind you, it's a fresh install) of life the Debian way you hit the reinstall button...

OK, before this degrades into name calling, YOU WIN.

Hey! I'm happy, too. Only Yowi has a bellyache. He doesn't have a clue about the situation, but it's terrible, whatever it is. Quoting Bob Dylan, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Yones."

I understood exactly what you meant by doing a dist-upgrade. and was attempting to explain to you why someone might want to do a re-install rather than an upgrade. (the suggestion to him was made by others, not me..)

Maybe you haven't attempted to install Debian on any relatively new hardware recently? Believe me it's far easier to get things working if the kernel used during installation supports ALL your hardware. Doing a dist-upgrade downloads probably as many new packages as you would doing a fresh net-install, so really what's the difference if it's a new installation to begin with ? it's not like he's trying to save years worth of custom configurations and data.

For an older system you have been running forever, a dist-upgrade would be a good choice. for a new installation it's not always the best choice.

Too bad no-ones opinion can be correct if it doesn't agree with yours huh ?

In the mean time I've had systems that simply wouldn't work with the older versions of Debian (etch) and an install with a newer version was the only option. I mean when the installer simply hangs at detecting hardware you don't have much of a choice. Likewise a successful install with only half the hardware functioning isn't much better. A suggestion to make a newbies life easier, when an experienced user may approach the problem differently, isn't necessarily bad advice.

Accept that other peoples opinions may actually have merit and I'm sure you'll have an easier time getting along with people here. None of us are right 100% of the time, but telling people their opinions aren't valid is certainly not a way to make lots of new friends.

...please stop, the irony is killing me!