Wed, 24 Nov 2004

Progeny Debian Developer Edition RC1

My Debian SID (still in development) installation on my home PC has been acting up for a while now, but not enough to force me to reinstall and go through the whole process of setting things up just right. A few days ago, I checked out the SUSE Linux 9.2 live CD, and was fairly impressed with it. Unfortunately, Novell/SUSE has not yet placed the full distribution on their ftp servers, so I began looking elsewhere.

The next day, I saw that OSDir.com had a brief article with an extensive screenshot gallery posted showing Progeny's Debian Developer Edition, Release Candidate 1. Since Debian is probably my favorite distribution I've used to date, I figured that I would give it a shot and proceeded to download the two CD images containing the required installation files.

To make a long story shorter, I deleted all files on my existing linux partition except for the /home and /etc directories, and renamed them /home_old and /etc_old. I kept the home directory since it contains all of the user data and files, whereas /etc contains lots of setup information that I thought I might need after the installation.

The 2 CD installation proceeded smoothly, although the actual process of copying the package contents to the system seemed to take a while. This could be due to the CD-R media the iso images were written upon, but I'm not sure. After the installation was completed, I rebooted the system and ... nothing. Crap!

I messed around with the grub boot loader options, and nothing I tried seemed to improve matters. I then moved my hard drive from /dev/hde to /dev/hdc, thinking that perhaps the kernel was having problems accessing ide3. After tweaking grub to try and load the kernel from /dev/hdc and removing the silent boot option, I got a crc error in the initial stages of loading the kernel. So, I figured that I would try to install it one more time.

Roughly 1.5 hours later, the system was installed (again), and the moment of truth arrived as the machine rebooted. This time, the system came up with no detectable problems! Woo-hoo!

My initial thoughts on the system after a paltry hour of use is that the distribution is clean, functional, and nice. I installed the workstation version to get all of the development tools installed along with the normal desktop apps. Gnome is the desktop environment installed, with Evolution as the mail client, Firefox RC1 as the web browser, and OpenOffice 1.2 as the office productivity suite. As a first impression of the distribution, I'd have to give it two thumbs up. I am sure that as I use it more, my opinion will be refined depending upon what problems/gems I encounter.

posted at: 09:11 | path: /computers | permanent link to this entry