[PLUG] - CentOS 5, + Debian Etch

Michael M. mcubed at slashmail.org
Tue Apr 17 14:43:54 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 00:09 -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> This evening I decided to wipe out CentOS 5 and try Debian Etch amd64
> (final) on my new computer. Installation went without issue, although
> the installer is not graphical. The installer worked, albeit parts were
> a bit confusing. 
> 
> Before installing it I removed the Intel 10/100 PCI card that I got
> from Free Geek, then went into the BIOS and enabled the onboard Realtek
> 8169 gigabit. With other distros the Realtek was either ignored or it
> would cause a kernel panic, so I had left it disabled. The first bit of
> good news is that Debian Etch is the first distro that not only found
> it but autconfigured it without so much as a hiccup. Yay!
> 
> The bad news is that it failed to find the onboard sound. This is the
> first distro that failed to find the sound chip. However, I have a
> guess -- the sound is also Realtek, and the sound and the gigabit are
> the only Realtek items. 

The Debian User list is pretty helpful with issues like that.  The
subscription page for all official Debian lists (there are lots of
them!) is here:

http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe

You probably want the plain ol' 'debian-user,' unless you want to test
out your Catalan, Icelandic, or Ukranian language skills. :-)

> 
> More bad news is that it failed to detect the nVidia GeForce 6100 and
> the Viewsonics G90f monitor. Fedora 7 and CentOS both found them and
> autoconfigured them. However, Feisty Beta also failed to find them.
> Maybe it's a Debian v. RPM thing.

Ditto above.

> 
> I also had to add "noapic acpi=off" to keep the mouse click from dying
> and to make the clock correctly. But I've had to do that with every
> distro so far.
> 
> It installed IceWeasel instead of straight Firefox, and the default
> browser is Epiphany. Java works, but no flash out of the box.
> OpenOffice.org is only 2.02, but everything works. I put a movie in the
> drive and Totem popped up and played it fine (but sans sound).

The officially unofficial repository for all evil proprietary stuff is
here:

http://www.debian-multimedia.org/

If you're sticking with Etch, you'll want to add the following to
your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

That will get you access to flash, the packages you need to play back
commercial DVDs, w32codecs, and other stuff.

But maybe you knew that already.

IMO, Debian testing is the sweet spot for desktop usage.  The new
testing repository is "Lenny."  I have been using Etch for a least the
past year, while it was testing, and experienced almost no problems.
It's more stable than many distro's releases, tends to have fewer bugs
and fewer uninstallable packages than Ubuntu's releases.  At the same
time, it generally stays pretty current, often bordering on
bleeding-edge.  Big packages, like new versions of DEs, will take a few
months to migrate to testing from Sid (unstable), but most packages move
from Sid to testing in a matter of days.  The gutsy go ahead and run
Sid.  Sid, however, is almost guaranteed to have some breakage once in a
while, so you have to be prepared to deal with that.  From my POV, Sid
usually acts as a nice buffer for catching and solving the bigger
problems before they hit testing.  That's not to say testing is always
bug free, but they tend to be niggly rather than show-stopping bugs.

But I wouldn't upgrade to testing just yet.  There will probably be a
period of instabilty as packages that have been held back (while Debian
was focussed on releasing Etch) flood into unstable and then into
testing.  I figure on waiting a month or two and monitoring the mailing
lists to find the appropriate time to make the jump.


-- 
Michael M.  ++  Portland, OR  ++  USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream." --S. Jackson





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