Crashing into the present day, Distro Queen happily runs Slackware as Home Distro of the Moment on both the iMac and the Toshiba laptop with KDE3 as the Desktop of the Moment. The Queen has not yet seen fit to wipe the awful legacy OS's on either platform, but those stories are for a later post. For now Distro Queen's befuddled brain struggles to grasp Debian Installation. For the record, the Queen typically tries out the latest can't-do-without distro on both the iMac and the Toshiba. It's a good thing Distro Queen loves drama because the special challenges of the iMac's ATI Radeon video and the laptop's ipw3945 wireless and hda-intel sound are just dripping with unadulterated Drama. For that matter the Queen considers successful triple-booting of the iMac a closely guarded Secret Family Recipe of the Black Arts variety.
At any rate Distro Queen was predisposed to appreciate the goodness of Debian, given those early tippy-toe dips into Ubuntu: the clean lines of the Gnome desktop, the purity of Debian Policy, and of course the unsurpassed package management. But can we talk? The install sucks! (Did I say the Queen is into Drama?)
- It turns out that Debian helpfully provides both text and gui installs. But why would the neophyte Debian Initiate even suspect this? You pop the CD in, reboot to the CD and get the nice screen with the cute genie smoke where you hit enter to boot. Nary a word about a gui install. It's off to the text install races. The Queen only found out about things like 'expert' and 'installgui' at the 'boot' prompt after the text based install crapped out on the Toshiba.
- Upon arriving at the partition screen on the text install Distro Queen is informed that 'Space' selects and 'Enter' activates button. Huh? The Queen gets along fine with text installs - being a Slacker after all - but what's going on with this? The Queen hit 'Space' all over the place and never selected anything. And what 'button'? No buttons to be seen anywhere. Distro Queen delights in following instructions but these directions get you nowhere but the Twilight Zone.
- And, yes, the text install failed on the laptop. It came to a certain point after completing all the software package installation and then suddenly the screen switched to illegible blotches - which still responded to the keyboard, if you only knew what you were typing. Having wandered from the premises while this was happening Distro Queen restarted the install just to check and, sure enough, it happened again. It was at this point that the Queen stumbled onto the instructions for 'installgui' - which worked like a charm on the Toshiba and happily managed not to crash just before the finish. On the other hand it was installgui that crashed rather miserably on the iMac - presumably due to the ATI video - so Distro Queen really doesn't know what to think.
- During the text install on the iMac, Distro Queen rejoiced to encounter a nicely succinct prompt inquiring whether the hardware clock is on UTC or not. This one little bit of Drama trips up many an otherwise dripping-with-goodness distro install in the Queen's experience. But wait! Little did the Queen know that Debian's text install goodness on this point would fail to deliver on the gui side. (Or is it the laptop side? Distro Queen can't be sure which, since 'laptop' is one of the standard install package options.) The subject never came up and the install proceeded to incorrectly assume local time - one of Distro Queen's Pet Peeves (how did you guess?) - sending the Queen into Debian's excellent documentation to find '/etc/default/rcS' to clean up the install's droppings on this point.
- Exactly how many times, O Exalted Debian Developers, must you remind Distro Queen during an install about not having selected a swap drive? Distro Queen is fairly dim about such esoterica but is nevertheless pertly energetic about eschewing the fabled Linux swap drive. The Queen finds 2GB of ram quite sufficient, thank you, and simply has no need of engaging in suspend and resume on the laptop, much less the desktoppy iMac. Nevertheless Debian Install insists on coming to a full stop no less than three times to rudely point out Distro Queen's shortcomings in this regard. Puhleeze, once is quite sufficient. The Queen has better things to do than sit and stare at a computer screen waiting with bated breath to reassure the timid install that it really is OK to forge ahead without a swap drive.
- Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection adapter: fully informed by the Linux Quest, Distro Queen wisely allowed Lenny's Update Manager to do its thing immediately after install. This took the kernel to 2.6.24 which made 3945 wireless a breeze after picking up 'firware-iwlwifi' from the repos. And Gnome's Network Manager Just Works, too: scanned Distro Queen's Airport Extreme Base Station and negotiated wpa-psk security with aplomb.
- Distro Queen has never seen such a mess as what users have to put up with in many distros trying to sort out the proprietary vs open source ATI Radeon video drivers: 'radeon', 'radeonhd' and 'fglrx'. Granted the confusion itself is not any distro's fault, but the Queen finds that some distros make negotiating these treacherous waters almost impossible - Ubuntu's Hardy Heron beta serving as a perfect example, having gotten itself mired up in a morass of gui-ized xorg configuration replacements that aren't well informed about Synaptic. But the Queen drifts . . . Lenny defaulted the iMac install to VESA video. Not what Distro Queen would have preferred, but where Debian shines in this regard is that the Queen was able to use Synaptic to select radeonhd and then fglrx and depend on the debs to get the corresponding configurations right. And Distro Queen marvels that 'fglrx' Just Works in Lenny/Gnome when it randomly crashes in Slackware/KDE where the Queen has had to default to 'radeonhd' instead.
- Jigdo: Distro Queen had never heard of this one but it converted a rant into a rave. When looking into Debian the Queen was fresh out of CDs and needed a DVD install instead. Now Distro Queen would have preferred a simple DVD download, but understands Debian's bandwidth dilemma. Horrified at the prospect of a week-long torrent download (having just survived one with Knoppix), the Queen was happily introduced to jigdo. Basically jigdo deconstructs the DVD iso into its constituent parts and then parcels them out one file at a time for download. Once it's sucked down all the files it then reconstructs the iso on the client side and you're off to the races. Again, this Just Works.
