Quote:
Originally posted by Genesee
my sentiments exactly!
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Same here. Well here's my little Debian story.
I started using Linux about 5 months ago. I had a lot of time to kill and I figured, well, why not give that Linux thing that everybody is talking about a try. I asked a friend of mine who I knew used Linux which distribution he would recommend. He said he was using Debian, but SuSE might be easier to learn. So I got me some blank CDs and gave it a shot. Fortunately, I had 2 hard drives, so I did not have to reformat my Windows partition.
I must admit, installing SuSE was easier than I thought. It asked me a couple of questions, partitioned my hard drive - a rather scary experience at that point - and then I was in KDE world. Not too bad, said I. So what can I do now? Let's try installing some programs. Wait, no .exe files? But how do you know which programs you can run? What's a package?
And then I discovered YaST. What exactly it does is still a puzzle to me. I remember thinking that if YaST is the _simple_ way of installing packages, I'll just go back to Windows. No thanks Linus.
A month or so later I talked to my friend again and told him about my miserable Linux experience. He told me something about the great package system of Debian, and I decided to try again. So I burned the 8 Debian CDs - the SOB didn't tell me about bf floppies - and plunged in.
At first, it wasn't that bad. I couldn't find ReiserFS support in 2.4.18, so I went with Ext3. The whole thing was up and running in half an hour, or so I thought. I stared blankly at the login: prompt, and wished I still had the pretty SuSE. After trying to understand the two pages of gibberish that typing startx produced, I thought, well, he did say it's not easy.
Then I RTFMed and STFWed for a while and finally understood what /home/foo/bar means. Oh, did you know that the Debian package repository does not have a package called foobar? I know this because I actually searched for it because one of the manuals used it as an example. Slightly embarrassing.
Then I got the 4 -bf2.4.18 floppies (and threw away the 8 CDs I burned earlier) and tried again. Only to get an error that said something about failing to copy the base system. I mean, base system? SuSE did better than that. My girlfriend was getting worried. I can't blame her, I mean, it's not easy to live with a walking insomniac who chants strange things like 'ext3 is okay but I really want reiser' to himself all night.
After a couple of days I figured it out: that damn Partitioning HOWTO suggested creating a small boot partition. Well I figured 50MB should be enough, right? They really should be more specific about the size of the Reiser journal when they ask you what type of file system you want.
Eventually (aka 6 times) it worked. I looked at the KDE screen and thought, this damn better be better than SuSE. And then I got to type apt-get install foobar. You gotta love Debian.
Of course, then came hours of kernel compiling, configuring slashcode from perl (try it, it's really entertaining. Don't forget to type apt-get install slashcode when all else fails - duh), looking at L??????????????? after installing Grub, etc etc. You all know how it is.
But now it works. I mean, really works. Blackbox and Debian - I never looked back to Windows. The Win2000 partition is still there though - just waiting for drivers for my MD player - but it's certainly not getting much action anymore.
And I finally convinced my girlfriend to give it a try. This time I went with Knoppix to save myself configuring Debian from scratch on a laptop (not that I didn't have to do it anyway), but yet again, Debian delivered.
The moral: Debian is the shiznit. I'm in love.
i never want to use windows anymore
