After a few days of settling in, I think I can say that my move to Debian on my laptop is complete. I started the installation last Saturday and since then I’ve been installing things little by little, tuning the installation. So far I’m quite happy.

The reason I felt the need to move was twofold. Firstly, my Fedora Core 1 installation was becoming crufty. I had lots of things installed on it, the HD was filling up and it was running dog-slow. I have had bad experiences with dist-upgrades on Fedora as well, so I wasn’t too keen on updating it. Add to that a dependency hell that evolved from the cruftiness, and I couldn’t really install much of anything any more. Secondly, I’ve been working with Debian recently and my second experience with it has been much more gratifying than the first.

I first ran Debian sometime in 1997 or 1998, and I wasn’t too impressed by it. I was moving on from a Slackware installation, so I had decent grasp on how the system administration worked, but I hadn’t used package management or anything like that. Of course, since net connections were uncommon back then, I can’t even remember if it had apt-get or not, I certainly never used it.

Anyway, I didn’t like it. dselect didn’t work for me, I don’t know why, and the feel of the system was just too different to what I was used to, offering seemingly nothing in return. I moved on after a few months and installed either RedHat or SuSE, I can’t remember.

Installation

Debian has evolved quite a bit since I first used it. An easy, lightweight installation and good hardware support and detection make it a breeze to install. I downloaded a net-install CD iso for the latest Sarge testing distribution and installed the most basic packages to get the system running, less than 200MB of download, apart from the 100MB installation CD.

Another advantage of using Debian is the quality of the independent repositories available, that make installing anything a breeze. There are certainly ample RPM repositories available for RedHat/Fedora, but packages from these seem to be quirky, sometimes needing other packages that aren’t provided anywhere or conflicting with each other in unsuspected ways. I don’t know if Debian’s superiority in this respect is due to a superior packaging format, but I have had no problems so far.

The reason I mention repositories is that after the basic system installation, I configured a couple of new repositories in order to install the latest X.org packages and the latest KDE 3.4 release, since the default Debian packages are really not suitable.

The installation was stress-free, apart from a small mouse problem. The default Debian install leaves you with a 2.4 kernel, not really acceptable in 2005. Now I had a problem, since my laptop is a P3 at 700MHz, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day compiling a kernel. I dug around a little and found a repository that provides a 2.6.10 kernel, enough for my needs. I’m sure a newer version will turn up in a couple of weeks.

Kernel installation went well, and I rebooted into the new system, with all the latest bells and whistles. I was surprised by how fast it booted up and ran, having become used to a long wait before I could do anything under Fedora. Also, the HD barely ever thrashes any more, which is a good sign.

The final stage of my bare-minimum-to-start-working install was getting my WiFi card to work. I use a generic 802.11g card, and I had already installed it under ndiswrapper a couple of times before, so it was easy to download the source, compile and install. Installation of the windows drivers was easy, and the only problem I had (and still have) is getting the system to recognize the card when I plug it in. If I boot with the card in the socket, it works fine. I needed to modify some files in /etc, but it wasn’t a problem.

And that’s the basic installation done! Not nearly as complicated as it used to be, and fairly painless to achieve a high degree of customization. The only thing I had to download and install outside of the packaging system was the ndiswrapper module and a couple of packages to enable native 3D accelleration in X. I also downloaded a .deb of kdebluetooth because there is no repository with the latest version.

Since then, I’ve installed some Bluetooth stuff to get communications with my cellphone working. This was insultingly easy, having taken quite some effort in my previous attempts. The only things I know I’m missing, but will install when I need them, are OpenOffice.org and a Java IDE.

Conclusion

Obviously, mine is not a beginner-friendly installation, but then I’m no beginner. I’m very happy that I was able to configure a relatively uncommon installation with minimum hassle, and with no problems that couldn’t be fixed in a few of minutes, again, by an experienced user.

Has Debian solved the problems I had with Fedora? Well, my HD is now 23% full instead of 97%, and I’m only missing what I mentioned above to reach the same number of things I use on the machine. The initial minimal install is really minimal, and allows you to build upwards in a simple fashion. Also, with my typical desktop running Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Akregator and some shell windows, I now use about 50MB of swap, instead of 200. Changing focus to another application no longer requires waiting for the appropriate memory to swap into physical memory.

So I’m happy with the change. Now I’ll just have to see how it wears in.

Repositories

In case you’re interested in following the same steps, here is my current /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contribdeb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contribdeb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contribdeb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contribdeb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main non-free contribdeb http://debian.linux-systeme.com unstable maindeb-src http://debian.linux-systeme.com unstable maindeb http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.0/ ./deb http://apt.cerkinfo.be/ unstable main contrib non-freedeb-src http://apt.cerkinfo.be/ unstable main contrib non-freedeb http://bluez.sourceforge.net/download/debian/ ./deb-src http://bluez.sourceforge.net/download/debian/ ./

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 at 6:08 pm and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.