[Lancaster] Meeting 5th November

[Ken Hough]

Sorry guys, but I won't be coming along to the LUG meeting tonight. I've got a 
few problems to attend to, including sorting out my PC. Also, I'm going away 
for the weekend and I've just realised that it's firework night, so don't 
want to leave my dog (a working springer spaniel) on her own tonight.

As I've mentioned, I was trying out Debian v5 which I was warming to, but a 
few problems have cropped up:

1. Debian policy doesn't allow for automounting. Mounting must be done by 
root. A real pain!
2. Despite following Debian specific instructions for installing Java, I 
couldn't get it to work.
3. Had a real foul up with VirtualBox. After installing the provided v1.6.x 
and getting it to work OK, I discovered that this version doesn't provide for 
USB. I removed this version and tried to install v2 via a Debian package (a 
complicated process), but this didn't work and it really messed things up so 
that I couldn't get the original version re-installed/working.

No doubt, these problems could be resolved by someone who really knows what 
they are doing, but I don't.   :-(

Anyway, I got increasingly fed up with some other aspects of Debian:

1. The (non graphical) installer appears to give only limited selection of 
software that will be installed, so that the user must play around after the 
installation is done. Also, like it or not, Gnome is installed. KDE must be 
installed separately. I just cannot get to like Gnome!
2. The user is required to enter info at a few stages DURING the installation 
process, so one can't simply set up all requirements and then leave things to 
run to completion (unlike with SUSE).
3. Why on earth does 'dir' to exactly the same as 'ls' ? I'm used to 
having 'ls' to list file names so as to get a lot on screen, and 'dir' to 
provide a full listing equivalent of 'ls -l' and with the colour option.

The upshot of all of this is that I've gone back to SUSE v11.0 which IMHO is 
much more flexible, user friendly, better presented, and generally works 
well.

The transitions have been relatively painless, because I keep my /home 
directory on a separate partition.

See you soon

Ken hough