September 13, 2006...10:50 pm
Installation revisited
Got the itch to install Linux again. Let’s hope this time it works better than the previous unhappy experience.
This time, I chose to install Debian–though it’s relatively more technical than Ubuntu: eg. you have to install and configure the graphics thingy yourself (X windows system and GNOME/KDE–otherwise no nice graphical desktop and windows). Not exactly sure in what other ways it is more technical. But anyway that’s what “they” generally say. “They” also say that Debian is a very well-established, secure and stable distribution, and that sounds very nice, especially the ’stable’ part. Anyway, I guess my Toshiba is pretty much rotting at home now, so why not give it a try? But one thing is true, Ubuntu is more appealing to me as a noob, partly due to their marketing, as someone commented on a blog post on Linuxhelp, mentioned again further down.
Here’s a couple of links to distro-choosers (if anything, they’re a fun way to waste time)
zegenie Studio’s Linux Distribution Chooser
:^tuxs.org’s chooser
Anyway, in preparation for installing Debian, I bookmarked their installation guide for Debian 3.1 ’sarge’, which is their current stable release (2005). I have already downloaded and burned the .iso file; took me about a night on my sucky cable connection.
The guide was full of useful interesting information that raised more doubts than I had started out with, but I guess it’s good to be prepared in case anything goes wrong.
One page that I found particularly useful was a list of things to take note about your hardware configuration, which was really nice because I still can’t make head or tail of the printout from Windows Device Manager (”Do I really need to know what all these ports/numbers mean? What should I really be looking at? Why the heck are there so many pages?”)
Just for interest’s sake, I intend to do a dual-boot installation (windows is still nice to fall back on, just in case anything goes wrong). I still have yet to solve the problem of one OS being unable to access/write files on the other OS’s partition. Eg. I have a directory of music files in my windows partition, but I can’t listen to these files directly using a music player in linux..or maybe it’s possible but I’m too much of a noob. Or, I save a document on my linux partition but I can’t even access files on that partition from windows, so I have to switch back to linux to work on my document.
Dunno when the next release of Debian will be. The author of Linuxhelp.blogspot.com has written an interesting review of Debian ‘Etch’ beta 3. Anyway the comments are rather informative as well, and provide several viewpoints as usual.
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