About Debian for old laptop...

[steppenwolf1984]

I'll wait for your report on Puppy, else I'll try plain Debian...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry I havent gotten back, but you know when you have those posting frenzies and you lose track of how many threads youre on?! Ive heard that happens to some people but I wouldnt know about it personally.... :P

 

Anyway, Puppy was interesting. Automatically creates a "home" file of 256mb, which defaults first to FAT 32 ?! Good Puppy...bite the Windows! but can be stored on ext2 or ext3 as well...at least theres no worries about saving changes etc. Its also, according to docs, based on Debian, as opposed to Knoppix Debian. In addition theres a Puppy Unleashed package to add onto it if you wanna install it, the usual pup-get, er, apt-get.... and even a bare bones puppy without mozilla and abiword in case space or download is a problem. The main complaint I have is the look...it chooses this retro Win95 ffvm desktop. If I were nostalgic for Windows I d use windows. DSL *looks* better but Pup seems more functional and option laden, including configuration of your mouse, etc. Definitely look into it, as I havent delved too deep. My ideal I guess would be a Puppy with the options of DSL and Slax.

Let me know how plain Deb goes....Ive fallen in love/lust with Mepis but I think its a sign to explore Debian.....

[theYinYeti]

Hi!

As can be deduced from some other topics, I finally dived into plain Debian 3.1.

 

I almost shied away from it at first, though. With Mandrake, I was used to the "1 boot floppy" scheme, for my laptop which cannot boot from CD. With Debian, I discovered that 1 boot floppy led to nothing; I then tried with 2 boot floppies: still nothing... I tried with 3 boot floppies (I had to go buy a new box, I wasn't sure those were still selling :lol:) which got me a little further, but not a lot :( Freeze! One week went by, and I found this:

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

 

This gave me more confidence in starting the Install CD, but got me no further. I then suspected a failure from the module that was displayed when the freeze occured: yenta_socket. In expert mode, I kept this one from being loaded, and install went well from this point on. This same module loads fine now at run time, though; strange...

 

The "conservative" nature of Debian makes it a good distro for my old laptop because, even though it is the latest Debian, it still has a 2.4 kernel, without which my laptop wouldn't run.

 

The basic install was very basic (no net, no X), and I soon discovered that the much-praised Debian dependency handling isn't better than Mandriva's. It isn't worse either, just different.

Mandriva tends to set all possible dependencies down to the minor revision, even the smallest ones; this results in being offered to uninstall the whole of KDE when you only want to remove kppp or kterm, or remove the whole system (!) when you want to remove rmt, or being unable to upgrade Mozilla, unless you upgrade the whole of KDE and Gnome plus some of the base system.

Debian relies much more on the user's knowledge. Even when installing the suggested dependencies for each installed package, you don't actually get all dependencies; this leads to sometimes unusable packages unless you have some idea about what is missing or you know your way with log files; eg: starting from the base install, I installed twm using aptitude, but that was not enough to get twm working, as I had to hunt for a couple of virtual packages first.

 

The system usage is very different. When you come to Debian, you realize how much of your Linux knowledge actually is LSB knowledge: you know chkconfig, /etc/sysconfig... In Debian, I found I had no idea how to setup the network... until I stumbled upon those few but precious words with the help of Google: "man interfaces", which is about the /etc/interfaces file.

 

Things I like about Debian:

- The "elegant" configuration files' layout and management.

- The files' organisation: all is well thought-out (and Mdv rightfully took many ideas from Debian): the "menu" system, the "alternatives" system, all the update-* commands...

- Packages "alien" (I used it for Dillo-frames) and "equivs" (I wish I had it in Mdv).

 

Things I dislike about Debian:

- System integration: no central tool, or even menu folder, with all configuration tools.

- The menu is a bit messy compared to Mandriva's IMO.

- It seems that some packages don't appear in the menu even though they should.

 

Things I appreciate/get used to (different, neither better nor worse than in Mandriva):

- Apt-get + aptitude.

- Startup scripts.

 

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Debian on my laptop.

 

Yves.