debian install
 

i suppose this is more of a general question than anything, so forgive me in advance for being vague. :-)

i've been trying to install the latest version of debian potato on a 233 laptop. i've had no problems getting redhat 7.2 and slackware 8.0 up and running just fine, but i wanted to try debian because: 1) i've heard it's a nice distro, and i like a challenge. 2) (more importantly) i can't get the soundcard working in redhat and slackware (stupid cd4237b chips... grrr) and i found a few people who were able to get sound working in deb.

anyways, the installation just seems to take forever and i literally spent 12 hours on it, and finally just hit the power button cause i seemed to be getting nowhere (just kept prompting me to configure things i didn't know i had selected to have on my system... italian dictionary...???). it's real easy to select which individual packages you want installed on slack and RH.... how do i do that in debian?

just wondering....

maybe it's because potato is the 2.2 kernel?

Woody is not far from release, and that's the 2.4 kernel. maybe you should just wait for that?

Part 1) That card's support was woefully lacking up through the 2.2 kernels. I've got one acting 'not-so-quirky' with 2.4.14,16,17 and they're still dropping updates in every other kernel.

Part 2) One of the things Debian hackers pride themselves on is that the install is horrible, but the package handler is brilliant. They're right. Once you get the hang of apt-get its going to be hard to ever deal with a kludgy RPM or .tgz ever again.

Cheers,

Finegan

of course, there's also apt-update.
fabulous if you have a super connection. just run it, and leave it.
:D

Debian users
 

Say, thats why i wanted to try it. The problem I had after finding where the XF86Setup was kept, was that my laptop mouse could not be configured. Argggg. I gave it the almighty try with a serial mouse as well as USB but to no avail. So its back to regular linux. I like the direction Debian is going, so hopefully soon ill be going back to it.

yeah, i've pretty much decided to stick with "good ol' slackware". i'll give debian another try on a spare machine and when woody is released.

guess i'll just have to do without a soundcard for now... oh well. :-)