Here I am again, with another Debian review. After my last review of Debian 3, I decided that I should try again. As I am a Slackware and Gentoo user, I wanted to know exactly what all these Debian fans were raving about.

Install system specs:

My first install of Debian was something out of a nightmare. It didn't detect my ethernet card, I had problems getting XFree86 to go, and the install process left me confused. I went into the install thinking that if I can install Gentoo and Slackware, I can install anything. I was wrong. Debian didn't go and I felt like a noob again. It owned me big time.

I tried several times since that horrid first encounter, but had no success. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I finally resorted to the Debian website. I read the install how to, and while I was reading I found my answer. My ethernet card was to blame. I had a ISA ethernet card in this machine and I was supposed to specify the IRQ that it used. Having found one of the problems that plagued me, I decided to go ahead and give it one more try. I wasn't too concerned about getting X on this box, as long as I could apt-get my packages during install.

I booted the machine, started the install process, and made sure I didnt botch the ethernet this time. I added my IRQ, and proceded on to the rest of the install process.

Debian uses an older kernel version (2.2 series) for stablilty issues. I have ran the 2.4 series for some time now, and have had no problems with them. It installed the kernel, and I rebooted. Once I rebooted, it gave me a message screen congratulating me on a successful install. Now for the fun stuff, as the system at this point has just enough to bootstrap and whatnot.

The next part is Tasksel, and dselect. They are package downloading and updating tools. I ran them and it gave me a cool package installation menu (similar to Slackware's where you can choose the groups of software you want to install). It asked me what software groups I wanted to install, I chose Xfree and a few others. Fairly straightfoward to this point. After I got done with that, I went into a package menu selection where I could fine tune the process, add extra packages, delete packages I didn't want, etc. That list was freaking huge! It had so many packages that I couldn't possibly go through them all. Good thing that you can run this process at a later time as I can't imagine sorting through all that stuff at one time.

It took some time for it to download and install the packages. so I grabbed some lunch. After it finished, I got an error that some packages didn't install, but they were not important packages, so I continued. After it finished, it asked me if i wanted to run Tasksel again. I chose no, and continued on in hopes of a running system. It exited the Tasksel and then threw me into a shell. I logged in my user account, and tried to run startx. It exited and gave me errors, so I redid my XF86config file, retried, and it worked.

Things I have noticed about Debian that would please any Linux user:

Things I noticed that did not please me was that after the install, Konqueror didn't work. But this is a fixable problem, as I intend to upgrade to a newer kernel and KDE 3.1. Aside from that, being a Slackware and Gentoo junkie, I am pretty impressed with this distro. It was a humbling experience at first, but I am enjoying the speed that applications run on it tremendously.

If you intend to install a distro that you can upgrade and maintain easily, want security out the yang (the package selection has TONS of security tools), and want your system to fly, then Debian is your ticket!