[Sussex] Debian & Gentoo

[Steve Williams]

After all the advocacy of Debian and Gentoo on this forum, I decided to
see what all the hoo-ha was about. I'm not yet on broadband, so I was
pleased to see Linux Mag's Debian/Knoppix DVD.

My server has been running SuSE admirably for some time, but as Debian
has a reputation for stability this seemed to be the right application.
Besides my server does not have anything on that is not backed up
(seriously!) or replicated on other machines.

Pop DVD in drive, start machine, select DVD boot. DVD boot starts very
nicely, type install at the prompt and away we go.

Hardware detection is great, my Sym-53x8xx SCSI card and Promise
Fastrack raid controller are properly detected along with all the other
hardware. Partitioning, package install etc. all goes swimmingly.
Then...

We get to the boot loader config. As I intend a Debian only install, I
ask for the boot loader code to be written to the MBR of /dev/sda. Would
it? No, it wouldn't. Despite several boot options (floppy, rescue CD
etc.) I could not persuade the Debian install to overwrite the previous
GRUB code in the MBR.

Much frustration and gnashing of teeth later, I decide to re-install
SuSE and leave room for Debian as well. Several re-installs later and I
get to tell SUSE/Grub to list the Debian partition as a boot option and
hey presto, Debian running without demur.

After the frustrations of the install, I wanted to install MySQL. 2
minutes with man apt-get and some lines uncommented in apt.conf and it
all happened totally painlessly.  apt seems to make upgrading and
installing utterly trivial - it's great!

Anyway, Debian seems nice and quick (Athlon XP1100 processor, 768Mb RAM,
2x30Gb RAID1 ATA-100 Mirror) and so far rock solid. KDE is still only at
2.2 but as it's my server I'm not too concerned to spend hours on-line
to upgrade to 3.?.

So, I've now got a spare 60Gb disk in my desktop with SuSE installed,
and a mind to install Gentoo over it. All I need now is a Linux Format
DVD with Gentoo 1.4. Does anyone know where I can find a newsagent that
sells Linux Format DVD edition in the Horsham/Crawley area, or does
anyone have one spare?

Steve Williams.