Well, if any of you have read my earlier post you'll know that I'm new to Debian and so far loving it. I thought I'd just take the time to cover my my experiences with debian (sarge) so far, and generally say hello

The install seems a little basic when you compare it to the likes of Fedora / Suse etc, but, it works! and that's all that matters for me I'm running it on a Dell X300 Laptop, and, an 'out of the box' (2.4 kernel) install seemed lovely and stable.

I wanted to run the 2.6 kernel to fully support the intel ipw2100 module so went ahead and installed it, at which point the synaptics touchpad broke and I had to install the drivers and configure it 'properly' but the good new was my wireless was now up and running - WEP and all

It seems more unstable since installing 2.6 though, with the laptop randomly freezing in Gnome, but, I'm willing to put this down to a bad ACPI implementation (maybe over heating?) which is why I am in the process of coooking a new kernel. I'll let you know if this helps at all.

I'd be interested to know the general concensus when it comes to the stability of sarge so please vote in the poll. The stable release can't be far away now, so you'd expect sarge in it's current form to be pretty good.

All in all though, so long as I can sort the stability issues, I think I'm going to be very happy with Debian. I wanted a TRUELY FREE open source OS, I think that way you get a real sense of belonging to a community that possibly has a greater dedication towards it / wants to learn how to do things for themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I thought RedHat looked great, it was very useable without straying to far from what we would recognise as Linux (bar a few questionable config GUI's) but straight from the box it's just all broken, I mean what kind of firewall has a default policy of 'ACCEPT ALL'??

Suse seemed excellent, but it strayed too far away from the familiarities of Linux, loosing the level of manual control that I want, and I believe that will only get worse now that Novell own Suse as they will want it to eventually compete with Windows which means GUI's for everything (GUI's are good, so long as they WORK and don't trample over your hand crafted config files)

Of course, you have to pay for Suse, and Fedora is a bag of crap (it is after all RedHat's testing ground), which brings me to what I like best of all about Debian...

There are no pretenses about the stability of each version, the name says it all - Stable / Testing / Unstable which means the end user regains that choice which at the end of the day is what we all want.

Sarge is testing and while stable 90% of the time, I have found packages with bugs and they are broken. The base system is 100% stable. I have 2 systems running woody and 1 sarge. I love it to bits but wonder some times if I am actually too Debianised and not conversant enough with other distros. I love the packaging system ( who doesn't) and my particular favourite is the way it handles networking as it seems much easier to configure than most of the others. Perhaps that's just because you come to have a better understanding of the network protocols because they are mostly handled by hand and not via gui. One of my systems is an ADSL webserver and has an uptime of 125 days and has been a real pleasure.

I mainly like how debian comes "not broken" out of the box. Kinda the opposite of Fedora. The packaging system is incredible and I'm very pleased. I have two boxes running sarge, one laptop that is running as a desktop. I do all my school stuff on it email, word process, etc. The other box is an ipmasq and so it has the base install with just a few services (FTPD, HTTPD, DHCPD, etc). I am really impressed at how quickly debian installs itself and the netinstall the the best thing since sliced bread as I can select just those few packages I want running.

I do however, miss the Fedora non-gui system. When I say that system I think that generally fedora was easier to handle (config wise). When you jumped into a text editor and ran around in fedora console, it was pretty self-explanatory (to the extent a text-only configuration can be). Everything seemed logical. Not to say that debian is a bit illogical in it's console mode, but it's just that things seem more complicated in text-only mode than fedora. An example would be when you want to add something at startup. You need to learn run levels and all that other good stuff that it's probably a good thing to know anyway, but in fedora you can do that too, as well as just add a line to your rc.local file which is like autoexec.bat in windows. That's just one example. I have run into others though.

bdogg, I have to agree with everythin you said there mate.

Im still a linux novice, but i've become used to the RH/Fedora way of doing things, especially as you say, in text mode. Wanna kill iptables? Easy... '/sbin/service iptables stop' Things are just made simple for you.

However, the main purpose of me running linux is for a home network server. Fedora's pretty cool, but its bloated and slow on my fairly old hardware. The install forces you to install a lot of stuff that i really dont want. And getting rid of gnome is a pain in the ass.

Thats why i put 'sarge' on a spare hdd yesterday and have been playing with it since. Install went pretty well, i went through with dselect and just got the few things i wanted. It only installed about 240mb, and even then there was stuff i prolly dont need, but didnt know if it was safe to remove it.

Have just setup SSH. Ive never even used this as a client before, nevermind a server. BUt it setup ok and is working. Just want to make sure its secure now.

Then onto apache, mysql maybe, ftp, samba and we're done. Then i might be brave and customise a kernel or something. Runs nice and fast. Now i need to learn all the little tips and tricks that debian carries. If everything goes smoothly, then i may swap the files over from the FC server.

Overall the install went really well, considering the bad things i'd heard about it.

lee