[Glastonbury] Linux's latest...

[Damon Chaplin]

On Mon, 2004-04-26 at 14:37, tim hall wrote:
> Damon,
> 
> On Monday 26 April 2004 11:58 am, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > I tried to install Debian 3 yesterday, since I've been thinking of
> > switching to Debian for a while.
> 
> What's Debian 3? do you mean 3.0 (i.e 'Woody') or 3.1('Sarge/Testing')

Woody, 3.0r2 (released last Nov.)


> > I think I've changed my mind! I had nothing but trouble, and still can't
> > get X running (with an nvidia geforce 5200 - not exactly a rare card!)
> 
> Yes, but nvdia don't release their source/specs, so they make it almost 
> impossible to write decent 3rd party drivers. They produce their own closed 
> source drivers, which are great if you don't want to watch DVDs (heh!-). I'd 
> personally lay the blame with nvidia. Seriously, I'd get a different make of 
> Video card.

XFree86 does include a driver for it, 'nv'. I have RedHat running fine.
It looks like Debian is unwilling to upgrade XFree86 in a minor release,
which means it won't work on quite a few new video cards.
Obviously they don't consider 'doesn't work at all' to be a serious
enough bug :)


> > I wish they'd focus on quality rather than quantity a bit more. (They
> > try to support too many packages on too many architectures, and fail.)
> 
> You should get a Mac Damon, they only support one architecture :].
> 
> The whole point  of Debian is that it will work on any hardware [1] and be as 
> configurable as possible without resorting to proprietary software, it 
> succeeds famously in that respect.

I don't think it is succeeding at present. Woody is quite difficult to
install and has nasty problems (it wouldn't recognise my USB mouse
either). Compared to installing RedHat it is truly awful.

I hope Sarge is an improvement. Apparently there is a beta of the new
installer if people want to try it. (I'll wait a few days until I've
calmed down!)

Damon