Different people have different experiences with the Debian installation process. Debian was my second distro that I installed. I migrated from Red Hat. I knew coming in from hearing all the horror stories that it wouldn't be a cakewalk but I was determined to install this distro. Armed with The Very Verbose Debian 3.0 Installation Walkthrough, I was able to wade thru the installation problem with few problems. Got a clean, non-bloated installation of Debian. Give it a try. Use the article in that link I posted above and you should have no problems.

Sounds like you are running debian on another drive. The answer is grub.apt-get install grub after the install run update-grub. Look in your /boot/grub directory you'll see 2 files that you need 1)dev.map which list the drive names as grub knows them against the /dev name.2) menu.lst edit this from the info you have from 1 and if you have Winblows as well add that from the example above and save. Next time you boot you'll have a nice menu to boot all the os's and their flavours. When you add a new kernel it'll update it as well.

If you like to "learn" Linux, rather than just "use" Linux, the Debian installer is a revelation. It's long, detailed, and highly verbose. It makes you make all the decisions, but IMO it explained each step very well. I only had to do it 6 times to get it right, LOL!
The only reason I got rid of Debian was that I could not for the life of me manage to find a way to get online once I had it installed. Later, someone told me that the basic 1-disc Woody installation I used didn't have a way for me to go online. Don't know if that's true or not...

I would love to have a more complete, up-to-date real Debian on my system. Not just Knoppix, because Knoppix won't let me create a separate /home at installation. I don't have broadband so downloading isn't an option. So I'm using Mandrake and I'm VERY happy with it.

It's not, they don't know what they're talking about if they said that. Total nonsense. I've only got Debian cd 1 that I had someone mail to me and one of the first things I did was get online with 56k access, base-config will do that for you. I upgraded X with baseconfig and the 2.4 kernel.

I did connect debian to a network with high speed access to upgrade KDE 3.1 for woody, and later finally updating to sid on that network, but I could just have well have updated KDE 3.1 on the 56k access and kept using sid.

Debian woody disc one installs everything you need including dhcp, wvdial, pppd, etc.

apt-get install ppp
apt-get install wvdial

apt-get install pppoe (if you've got dsl)
etc.

Debian will take care of what you need for you then you can easily connect if you've got a 56k modem that works with linux.

I only used Disc 1 for my installation and I am able to get online just fine. What are you using to connect to the net? Do you need a dhcp server to assign you an IP address? Did you configure you network settings properly?

It was a year or more ago, so I don't remember the specifics beyond this.

I just use a regular dial-up (hard) modem. I was able to configure my network (I think), just couldn't find kppp or a similar app to get connected. I tried pon but it didn't work.
Pon worked just fine in Knoppix, though; I liked it so much better than KPPP! Is there a pon equivalent command for Mandrake?

Dunno about that Tigerflag,

but if you read the rant that I posted earlier, you will appreciate just how much shit I had getting things up and running.

I only managed to get it playing audio cd's this morning. But last night and today, I hve tried both 3.1 and 3.2 of knoppix.

Better than the manual choices that I managed to make with "proper" debian, more efficient, etc etc.

I am seriously thinking about binning the proper debian completely, doing a hard disc install of knoppix and using that.

I wonder if it's got something to do with the fact that knoppix team must be quite small, as opposed to the debian developers who apparently do everything by commitee descision, including what they are having to drink i.e. coffee, tea, mineral water or rats piss!

regards

John

Knoppix is great. I just wish I could set up separate partitions with it. Mandrake 9.1 was better than Knoppix, Debian or Slack at setting up my burner and was the only distro I've tried that detected and had drivers for my printer. I found I like the Mandrake menus better, too.
Debian would be my preference over all of them, I just don't have the time right now to fiddle with it.

Ha, yes you're right there.

I'm just lucky enough to be booting mandy 9.1, debian sarge, eckspee with the option for knoppix.

Tell you what just pissed me off though, I always used realplayer under mandrake - cos when I was setting stuff up, my burner and the like, I found XMMS a mega nuisance, the only path that I could find to make it play cd's was so long and convoluted I just ended up using realplayer and kscd.

Now it's a bit of a saga getting kscd to play cd's with debian, but I was just looking into getting some streaming radio, and automatically looked into real player, which under debian seems like it woul be a total F****r for a nugget like me, but I go to the virgin site, see that they have an ogg stream, so I downloaded the live.pls, selected the ogg stream, opened the xmms that I managed to install with sarge, opened the live.pls with the playlist and as if by magic I got the virgin stream.

After having had so much hassle getting things to work with debian, it's starting to annoy me when something goes so smoothly It just means that now I've got to go back into mandrake and get the poxy xmms playing streams there as well

Still, mandrake or debian ? dunno, in some sick way, I'm starting to at least understand what people mean when they say shit like they enjoy the challenge of linux

regards

John

Well, bugger me sideways with the rough end of a pineapple, I booted back into mandrake and did the same as I did with debian and I got the virgin stream playing while I type

Oh well, as they say "shit happens"

regards

John

Debian for me, even after OpenBSD, Gentoo, and Slackware, was a pain to install. It doesn't need to be, but it is nonetheless. You have other options as pointed out in this thread, however the default "Debian" install, is indeed a hard. Some say "yeah, but you only have to do it once" however I retort with, it's not necessary to be so hard. It's almost as if it's hard just to be hard.

That's my take on it anyway

Cool

I agree with what you said. But there are tutorials on the net that make the installation process a whole lot easier. And plus once you get the blasted thing installed and start using apt-get you kinda of forget the hell you went thru to install the thing. "Kinda of forget"! It still lingers when someone brings it up. Like a flashback!

I'm on week three of debian, which is my first experience with linux.

Before I installed it on this computer, I put it on my boyfriends computer and it was quite easy. The only issue was it didn't detect the sound card. After about a week of playing I put windows back on his machine and installed it on mine.

Installing on my computer was another story

First, it didn't like my video card radeon 7500 and x wouldn't start. (what! no screens found??) I upgraded XFree86 to 4.2.0 and tinkered with the XF86Config file and was able to get into gnome and kde but video was still crappy, errors all over the XFree86.0.log. So I went to XFree86 4.3.0 and it didn't detect my mouse, x wouldn't start. Once I fixed up the mouse settings in the config file it would start. glxgears would run under 4.2.0 without errors but only at ~90 fps. Now running glxgears I was getting errors though it was going at ~350 fps but the gears were flickering and definately not running well. I scoured the internet and found I need to recompile the driver using XFree86 binaries and copy it over the module in the /lib/modules/../char/drm folder. All fine except I didn't have a radeon module there. I had to recompile the kernel with the radeon driver as a module. Then finally it worked.

But since recompiling the kernel I had lost my internet connection! I recompiled it again with different network card options and it would load and detect my nic, but no IP address. I had to use a staticly set IP and add the default gw manually because for some reason DHCP wasn't enabled, and I was getting errors enabling it. I decided to worry about that later and get SOUND working since it hadn't yet. ( I finally figured out later that when I compiled the kernel I didn't enable socket filtering that dhcp wouldn't start )

After failing at installing alsa from alsa's website ( since I'm a newb and knew very little about apt-get ) I finally did an apt-get for alsa and got sound working.

In the process of getting alsa ( I think ) I made a bit of a mess: KDE was gone and some apps were missing from gnome. apt-get install kde fixed the missing kde.

At this point everything was working pretty well except having to set my IP staticly. Hmm bored now...so I decided to play around more and upgrade to SID....

Well that broke everything! Gnome was toast! I screwed around for hours unable to get it back. Everytime I did apt-get anything the operation would be terminated due to too many errors. I finally gave up and did a fresh install. Since I already knew what to do to get sound and video working it was easy. I upgraded to unstable right away this time and I had a bit of trouble getting gnome. But it's working great now Holy crap that was a learning experience! I should get a badge or something for all of that.

Welcome to the forums, debbiedebbie! What an experience! You DO deserve a badge. All I can say is you're a braver woman than I am, and with a moniker like yours, I think Debian has to be your distro ;-)

Siri Amrit

Just to keep you up to date,

at the moment, debian isn't hard at all.

This is mainly to do with the fact that I have just installed knoppix 3.3 over the top of my debian sarge install, and things are going well(ish).

for some reason, during the install, I got an absolute mountain of I/O errors - some which I understood, some not.

I am just going through it now to see what works and what doesn't.

But it looks a shit load better than my sarge install ever did.

I'll keep you posted

regards

John

p.s. If installing debian via knoppix is like this, then that makes it almost as easy as mandrake.