[Preston] A new hope for Debian wannabees?

[Guy]

IMHO Debian is not difficult to use at all, (hell, I can do it!) in fact the 
apt system for package management makes life totally simple. What tends to 
put people off is:
1) The text based installer.
2) The lower emphasis on auto-detection of hardware.
BUT:
If you have already got an 'easy install' version of Linux up and running you 
get practically all the information you need from sniffing around the config 
files.

What I would do is this:
- get a clean floppy disk.

- save a copy of /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (providing X windows version 4 is 
working OK)
cp /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 > /floppy/XF86Config-4
(or wherever the floppy is mounted). When you come to configure X you have 
all the monitor and graphics card info. (maybe print this file out)

- create a list of the modules used by the kernel as a text file: 
/sbin/lsmod > /floppy/modules.txt 
With this you can get non-detected hardware to work again by supplying the 
correct modules again.

- create a list of the pci bus connections: 
/sbin/lspci -v > /floppy/pci_list.txt 
this is useful for checking for IRQ conflicts.

BTW, the standard install of Debian 3.0 uses a 2.2.20 kernel, so it has less 
support for USB devices. It can easily (using APT) be upgraded to a 2.4.x 
kernel.
Do not be intimidated by the text based installation, just answer 'Y' to 
anything you are not sure about. Most settings can be overridden at a later 
date, anyway.

Regards,
-- 
Guy

On Monday 18 November 2002 3:20 pm, you wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I just found this web page:
>
> http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html
>
> If there are any people (like me) on this list that want to try Debian but
> are too scared then maybe this will help - I'm really thinking about giving
> it a try now (was previously on SuSE 8.0 then Mandrake 9).
>
> Enjoy!
>
> bye just now,
>
>
> matthew
>