[Sussex] A nice Debian day

[Gavin Stevens]

Hi all,

I managed to get an hour or so to play properly with Debian Sarge on my
second PC.

I am pleased to say that I had a fine & productive time.

I had deliberately done 3 fresh installations in the interests of
learning & of gaining a few tips for my planned "non-techie" talk at a
moot in the near future. I was trying different options each time just
to see what happened in the first 2 installations & in the third I just
wanted to set it up right for me.

The Debian installer is good & I didn't have any big problems with it,
but then I have been using Debian since Potato & maybe I've got familiar
with Debian ways.

After the 2 learning installations, I now have a good, if familiar,
set-up with straight X & Icewm, topped off with dfm as a file manager &
desktop manager. I intend to try rox-filer & idesk at some point soon,
just for a change.

One small oddity occurred when trying to play sound for the first time:
Initially, it wouldn't mount /cdrom, muttering about "bad superblock, or
no file system specified" & probably a couple of other things (I have
seen this before). So I looked in /etc/fstab & the entry was correct, so
I tried again & it mounted. Then I tried playing the CD & XMMS then said
that I couldn't play sound (again not unexpected). I can't remember the
message now, but I looked in /etc/group, ready to edit it so that cdrom
would be accessible to the normal user account, but it was also already
setup correctly. I tried again & the CD played fine.

Has anyone else experienced this having to look at a file, finding it to
be correct, & then the mere fact of having looked at it appearing to
correct the problem?

So I'm rather impressed with Sarge & I am now wondering whether I should
upgrade Ubuntu, which is on my main PC at present or go with Sarge. I
can see pros & cons in both options. Quite a choice.. One question on my
mind right now: If I did a custom install of Ubuntu so that it used
straight X & Icewm just like my Sarge installation; what would it give
me over & above what Debian offers? The question could also work the
other way round I suppose.

Gavin.