Your Debian Lenny Experience
 

It's been a month since the release of Lenny stable.

What has been your experience so far?

I am a newbie to linux.

How to full install Lenny?

I have installed debian 5 i386 DVD 1 on my "Acer Aspire One" it didnt ask for another DVD!
How Can I Fully Install All Packages In Lenny after a logging in with root?

You should NOT install all the packages. There are over 20,000 of them!

The installer doesn't ask for other DVDs because you only need DVD1 to do a full core and desktop installation, which provides you with most of the packages you need.

I've been using Debian for almost 3 weeks now-installed it various times on both my HP Pavillion a810n AMD Athlon64, and my Toshiba 7000CT laptop.
All installs were via the Debian-500-i386-netinst.iso found here-
( http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ )
I chose netinstall mostly because I didn't want to burn multiple CD's.
The installs went smoothly for both computers, however I had one problem after the second FULL (I checked "desktop" and "base") install on my Desktop PC-after rebooting, I logged in, Gnome starts and a few moments later a window popped up saying-"kernel failure".
At first I thought it was a major error, as subsequent boots went the same way-everything would load fine-then the pop-up warning.
Nothing "crashed" or acted funny, so I re-installed anyway and haven't had further problems.
My purpose in wanting Debian at all was to see if I could get a very minimal install for the Toshiba laptop, which only has a 4GB HD and 160MB RAM.
I chose Debian Lenny, Slackware 12.2, GoblinX-2.7-Micro/Mini, Wolvix-Cub/Hunter, Crunchbang-Lite-8.04, and Puppy 4.1.2 in a "competition" to see which distro would give me the apps I need in the least amount of space-the catch being that each one had to be able to retain it's minimal footprint-but provide either the ability to easily compile packages from source and/or provide a Package manager with an extensive repository.
Out of all of them Debian Lenny and Slackware 12.2 are basically the winners-GoblinX and Wolvix only fell to second because they are based on 12.0, or 12.1 I believe. Because of this I could not include two apps needed-Gambas2 and Writer's World Maker.Both GoblinX/Wolvix are soon to release versions based on 12.2 Slackware.
Debian's strength's are it's package repositories and ease of use-these are also Slackware 12.2's strength's.
I only installed a minimal Debian system-that is when asked to install "desktop", "laptop", and "base" install-i unchecked all of them.
After installing and rebooting, I aptitude install-LXDE, and synaptic.
After adding Gambas2, WWMKR, and abiword-I had a fully working Debian install that ran fast and LXDE is nice! The install came up to 1.35 GB-which is small by today's standards.
I'm sure I could probably remove other things, or add anything i want.
So, in comparison, I think Debian is at the same level as Slackware 12.2. Both are the best of what Linux has to offer in terms of flexibility, packages, ease of use, and reliability.
I would rate Debian Lenny at a 10.

Both of my Etch->Lenny upgrades broke my propietary UPS monitoring daemons. Both are now running free equivalents.

My fresh install of Lenny and immediate upgrade to 6.0 on my laptop is wondrous, it's amazing how nice it is one your hardware is more than three months old.

I use Sid....never had anything I could not resolve...

I've upgraded about 20 systems so far all over ssh. I also put the new stable 2.6.26-1 kernel in them. 19 times it went well, but one time it went very poorly. The system in question is very old, the hardware is from the late 90s, and Debian Woody was installed back around 2003 I believe, via a custom kernel.

The disk is a scsi with a PCI adapter card, but for some reason it was called /dev/hda. Obviously the 2.6.26 and beyond kernels have changed everything to /dev/sda, and for some reason the installer didn't perform the renaming. /etc/fstab still has /dev/hda listed, as did grub, but the kernel looked for /dev/sda. Once I went to the machine with knoppix, I edited the files /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst and assumed all would go well. Something in the install of Lenny trashed the boot. I couldn't boot into 2.6.18 (from Etch), or 2.6.8 (from Sarge), but it could boot into a custom 2.6.11, or the custom install kernel which iirc was 2.4.16 or so. I boot into the 2.6.11 kernel, updated grub to grub 2, then all kernels would boot.

I don't blame Debian for this, we're talking very old hardware and some strange kernel circumstances. The intriguing part for me is why the Debian kernels wouldn't boot at all at one point, but handrolled ones did.

lspci reports this as the scsi controller -
00:09.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7892A U160/m (rev 02)

The other 19 machines I've all done remotely over ssh and have had clear sailing.

Peace,
JimBass

Using lenny from the testing stage on with no probs
 

I really LOVE debian. Even the testing distribution is as stable as many other distros stable version likes to be :-)

Been using Lenny since beta. Smooth as silk, rock stable and a pleasure to run.

The only issue I've had is that ntpd, nmbd and smbd won't start reliably during init. There is some interaction with networking/dhcp that on my system prevents at least one of these daemons from starting 75% of the time. I've found several posts on this going back a few years but no solution, so I have to start them by hand after boot up.

Other than that it is solid.

Steve

No problems.
 

Just did a fresh install of debian with no problems. Still prefer slackware, but I think its mainly because its what I am used to though.

I normally do a netinst of lenny and once the base is installed, switch my sources.list to testing. So far so good.

I think it's a little bit slower than Etch running in the same machine. Anyway, I'm going to do some benchmark with Bootchart to determine what it's causing the slow of the system.

The other problem I had was with a Huawei e226 USB modem, but I've solved within 2 or 3 hours.

Lenny has even more dependencies-of-dependencies lunacy then Etch had, so I switched back to Etch a few months ago. Probably this lunacy comes from the Gnome team and I've been very, very tempted to compile Gnome from scratch because of it.

Updated custom desktop and Toshiba laptop etch>lenny; went smooth except for rebuilding madwifi for laptop atheros. Very impressive, no problems, it's my main system.