[sclug] Debian Install

[Will Dickson]

Derek M Jones wrote:

> Leon,
> 
> 
>>I have decided to move my desktop from RH to Debian, however I have run into
>>a little problem with the SCSI drivers.
> 
> 
> Like you I am a RH user and have the same SCSI card as you.
> 
> Without wishing to start a religious war, from the developers (non-kernel
> in my case, non-system software) point of view isn't one of the major
> distributions much the same as the other?  They all have their good and bad
> points.

Also without wishing to start a religious war, I've run into some fairly 
serious, and to me surprising, hardware-support issues with Debian 
(Woody) that I haven't seen elsewhere; this is for pretty vanilla 
hardware as well. Examples:

- Error messages generated by Java to the console don't print properly - 
there's a new-line but no carriage-return, so each line starts one 
character to the right of where the previous line ends.

- When the console times out, it blanks the screen (fair enough). 
However, rather than going into power-save mode, the monitor displays 
the "I can't cope with this signal" indicator. (X with a blank 
screensaver is OK though.)

- And this one is the real nightmare: it corrupts large files written to 
250MB ATAPI Zip disks. The file is the correct length, but when you 
unmount the disk, re-mount it and read it back, the data is garbled. As 
a result of this, I discovered that about 4 years worth of 
mission-critical issue tracking database wasn't backed up, when I 
thought it was. Not a pleasant feeling!

As a result of this one, I've gone back to SuSE. 8.0 was a dog (which 
was why I tried Debian) but 8.2 is a massive improvement - I'd recommend it.

- Will.