masq's Journal: Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory...

I installed Debian on my dual P400 the other day. It's SWEET. Debian rules. I had no problems with the install, and even if I did, there are idiot-proof general settings that take maybe 10 minutes to burn through without even thinking.

I've been running RedHat since version 3 or something thereabouts. My friend Keni-san and me went together on a copy. It was completely unusable, but we foolishly smoked our Windows' partitions anyway and gave it a shot. RedHat5.2 was much better, and that's the one where I struggled through the install and setting up hardware, but when I finally saw Enlightenment, my brain cooked, and since then, I've always had a version of Gnu.Linux onhand. At first I partitioned my HD, and ran a dual boot setup, then I bought a second hard drive and a HD Tray for swapping them out, so I didn't pollute my Linux with Windows.

Masq's Rule #753: It's always good to have an entirely legitimate Win98 Hard Drive for when the Feds bust down your door and start shooting up the place.

Debian's so good, and apt-get is sooo bloody sweet, (once I figured out how to get stuff from the unstable branch), I don't wanna switch back. I'm not gonna. You can't make me. Debian is like Brain Candy. I'm already turning into a moron, trying to apt-get anything and everything, just because I can. Do I really NEED the German Language Pack? Hell yeah, it's just an apt-get away. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I feel like Dubya with all them shiney buttons, hyuk hyuk.

I guess you know by now, I really like my Woody. Heh heh.

I highly recommend Debian. No bloat besides what you put on there yourself. The stable branch is a little bit ancient (which bugged me with Mozilla, but besides that is okay). Some of it's so old, there's code written in Hebrew by a hacker named Moses (He parsed the red C). Ha ha. That was so bad, I should kill myself. Duhh... But he does look a lot like RMS, I should respect him or I could get Gnu-slapped by the bearded wonder.

I like the auto apting security updates. Cron them, so you're always up2date.

Next week, I'll be installing Deb at work as an LDAP server. The guys want to share their Mozilla addressbooks with each other. Yay. Debian is perfect for PHB requests like this one. AFAIK, Debian saves me time, energy, and money. More time, energy and money means Lil' Seniore Masquito has more freedom to sleep, drink coffee, and gamble on Survivor. That's why Debian rules. It lets me gamble more. Thank you free software! And they called it "UnAmerican". Bah. What's more American than gambling on Survivor?

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Well... maybe gambling on the WWF.

not to troll my fav. distro, but...

[intermodal]

you ought to try Gentoo. custom compiled optimized systems are a wonderful thing.

Re:not to troll my fav. distro, but...

[masq]

Gentoo looks VERY COOL. Maybe I can install it next month - I already hit my highspeed bandwidth cap for this month...

What's the difficulty level on a Gentoo install? And where can I find which optimizations to use? man gcc?

Thanks!

Re:not to troll my fav. distro, but...

[intermodal]

actually much of it is in the gentoo install doc. also, the gnu documentation is good for processor optimization options. make sure you check out the USE flag list too, or use ufed.

Re:not to troll my fav. distro, but...

[intermodal]

oh, and the install is easy but very manual and takes a while. But the nice thing is you learn a lot about linux in general in the process. Before trying gentoo though, make sure you know how to configure your kernel

Re:not to troll my fav. distro, but...

[masq]

Thanks!

Re:not to troll my fav. distro, but...

[intermodal]

btw, it is a very manual install but you do a lot of custom optimization and learn a lot about the underlying system as well in the process, making it far easier to troubleshoot should something blow up on you later, just so you know.