Debian installed
Well, I just completed installing Debian Etch (the testing version) onto my main linux box.
This move was kinda forced on me when the Suse install I had on there decided to crap out last week. Not sure what went wrong with it, but it seemed like a good oportunity to put Etch on as I planned on doing that some time anyhow.
I have to say it went pretty smoothly. Well, up to a point!!! There were some 'issues', but they resolved fairly easily, and that was that.
Main problems were as follows :
1. Couldn't install the standard dektop software selectable from the install menu because of a dependancy issue. I figured this was because of it being the testing edition, although I had installed without problems into a vmware container previously, but curiously, I installed the sarge version via dvd onto my laptop, and had the same issue.
I had to install a base system, then use aptitude to install the other stuff.
2. Couldn't install KDE because of dependancy issues. Almost certainly a testing issue this time. I just got XFCE installed, got synaptic running, and set up an ftp repository pointed to both the testing and unstable distributions, and selected the kde components, and let it download the neccessary bits as required.
3. Samba wouldn't let me in. An old favourite this, one I have visited many times on linux distros before.
First step in the solution process is to install and run webmin, and use that to convert linux users to samba users, and set the passwords up, much easier than doing it by hand. Still no joy!
After some head scratching and cursing, I finally released that my user account was, for some reason, disabled. Webmin wouldn't enable it, so a trip to the command prompt and an smbpasswd -e sorted it, and there was the debain system all lit up on my WinXP box, and I could copy all my data back across.
4. Still can't launch my pdf attachments from thunderbird. I tried upgrading to the latest version, as that is reported to resolve such problems, but still no joy. I'll track it down eventually.
On the plus side, the courier-imap install worked like a charm first time. I have my emails stored on the linux box in an imap config using courier, and once I pointed thunderbird at my saved configuration files from the suse setup, all my emails were there without having to do anything else, much simpler than the setup process on suse.
5. The scanner caused problems again, until I realised it was just the old file permissions issue. I added my username to the scanner group, and all was well, although I had by then also updated the sane scanner libraries, but that may not have been neccessary.
So far, everything else seems to be working OK. I re-installed Crossover, and have all the windows apps I previously installed on the suse system available without any re-installation, even excel and co. which I thought I may need to re-install from scratch.
Sound worked first time, no problems, and my printer installed and worked OK, which has sometimes been an issue previously, as it is on a print server, but the latest versions of cups seem to have no problems finding and setting it up.
So, so far so good, and the laptop install was almost as smooth, although sound doesn't seem to want to work on there, but that's nothing new. I may go back to using OSS for the sound on there, as alsa just doesn't seem to enjoy itself at all.
Two down, just have my soon-to-be server to go. I think I'll go for the debian testing on there again, although I may be tempted into the official sarge version, as the server is a 64 bit intel, and I think the dvd version of sarge I have has the 64 bit intel kernel on (it definitely has the amd 64 kernel), so that may fair better.
