[sclug] My first Debian install

[Antony Bartlett]

Woohoo!  I now have Debian (Woody) installed.

I took Simon Heywood's advice and just downloaded the first iso.  Cheers 
Simon, that works a treat!  And many thanks to everyone else who offered 
me advice after my "seven reasons not to download Debian post", you were 
all great.

I am somewhat non-plussed by the Debian installer... my first three 
attempts to get an operational desktop system were, er... intresting.  
I'm particularly not a fan of  suddenly but delibrately being dumped at 
a command prompt.  <sarcasm>Silly me, all you've got to do is get root 
then type...

/sbin/shutdown -r now

....and when it reboots you have the desktop that you were wanting... 
should have been blindly obvious that was what I was supposed to do, why 
didn't I think of that sooner </sarcasm>.  I don't know if it was 
because I finally did a clean reboot instead of just hitting the reset 
button, or one of the installers questions (maybe the one about 
frame-buffering) that I answered differently, that finally did it.  But 
hey, I have it installed now, so never mind.

Once I was happy I went straight into Knoppix and burnt myself a CD 
image of my new Debian partition... so that if I screw things up I wont 
have to go through that installer again!  Knoppix is a great little 
bootable CD... new users can get a taste for Linux without having to 
install anything... it's great for doing anything with hard-drive 
paritions because it doesn't have to mount a single one of them in order 
to run... and it's got some great games on it to! (if you ever find 
yourself needing to chill out because you've just discovered you don't 
have a single functional operating system on you harddrive, you can 
still boot Knoppix and play the games)

    Best wishes,

       Antony


P.S.  Yes, Knoppix is Debian based.