[tlug] Onto Debian via MEPIS

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

Tlugers,

About a month ago, we had a bit of a conversation among some RH users
who thought they might start looking for other options in view of the RH
end-of-life announcement.

I had been gradually growing impressed with the approach of the Debian
project, but had shied away from it due to rumors of its difficulty. But
with the winter holidays here, I decided to take some time to give it a
shot, starting with an attempted installation on an oddball Clevo laptop
that I bought at Pasokon Koubou in April of last year.

While I was able to get the stable Debian (Woody) installed after
gathering some video and network drivers on my own, I could not get it
installed with a 2.4 kernel, so I was stuck with a 2.2 kernel, which did
not support my USB drive or Ext3. When I subsequently compiled and
installed a 2.4 kernel, I would lose my network card. I spent an intense
week on the Debian users lists, and got a lot of really decent help, but could never
resolve this.

Alternatively, I tried to install Sarge (testing) and Sid (unstable)
with every sort of ISO and boot option there was, but these would go
through neither on my Clevo, or on my Dell Dimension desktop, a fairly
standard machine. There was always device hangup or dependency issue
somewhere.

Just to re-check out my first Linux distro, Mandrake (and to use their
Diskdrake partitioner), I installed Mandrake 9.2. This went fairly
well, but with keyboard bugs, and still with the old conflict problems
on Emacsens for doing utf-8 and XML. I gave Fedora a shot too, just for
the heck of it. It would not install at all on the Clevo. I got it set
up on my Dell, but at present it has far fewer options and inferior device
recognition as compared with my prior RH 9 setup. I could not get it to
give my monitor better than 800x600 resolution (I suppose I could, if I
wanted to waste another afternoon), and it did not have my favorite mail
package, MEW.

Going back to try again with Debian I came to realize from my
conversations on the Debian lists, that Debian's largest present problem
is the lack of a good installer. I agree. So does Bruce Perens, it
seems.

Knoppix was recommended. I tried it with some satisfaction on the Clevo,
but it retains some of the basic device recognition problems as the
Woody installer, in that it would recognize my network card (Realtek
8139, a notorious one) while using the Live CD, but would lose it once I
installed to the hard drive (modconf, pppeoconf, etc., NG). It also
would not recognize many of the odd SiS components on the Clevo.

I was almost ready to throw in the towel and go back to RH9, when
another Debian userlist fellow recommended MEPIS as a Debian "front
end." I figured, why not, I tried everything else.

Wow. It recognized every odd device on the Clevo 1280x1064 monitor,
*sound*, network card--all automatically. Has a nice partition manager,
and some of their own MEPIS tools. And basically, it's a Debian
(apt-get, you know).

It's an early work-in-progress, with its own instabilities, in addition
to using a lot of Debian unstable packages. You are also pretty much
limited to KDE at the moment. But I haven't had any serious problems
during the first few days. It's not perfectly Debian-compatible, in that
they've rewritten the kernel, so you are taking your chances if you do a
standard direct Debian kernel update. But as a way for a Debian newbie
to get his/her feet wet, it's not a bad option, I think, $10 for a CD. I
figure, if they ever get a decent installer on a plain Debian system, I
can always try that down the line.

Well, I figured that after all of the Happy New Years chatter, it might
be stimulating to talk about Linux again!

Chuck

---------------------------
Charles Muller  

Toyo Gakuen University
Faculty of Humanities  
1660 Hiregasaki, Nagareyama-shi
Chiba 270-0161 JAPAN

<acmuller@example.com>
http://www.acmuller.net
Mobile Phone: 090-9310-1787