Bullet to the head

Well, last night the time had finally come. I like Gentoo, don’t get me wrong, and my laptop has run it as it’s Linux distribution for some time. But upgrading a Gentoo system is PAINFUL on it…and though a 1GHz machine isn’t very fast nowadays…it’s actually the second fastest machine in my house. emerge ‘world’ takes all weekend, if I’m lucky and it works. And then, last night, the final straw. The freakin’ thing ran out of disk space about 80% of the way through. I’m not enough of a Gentoo-geek to know what I could and couldn’t whack from the /tmp/packages stuff…and the whole thing had been annoying me for 6 months anyway. So I whacked it.

I’d been looking for an excuse to play with the new Debian Installer anyway. So I burnt a beta 4 CD last night, and crossed my fingers. (the other reason I’d held off on re-installing had been the overall PIT-buttness of laptop installs, with funky hardware support, etc. The Gentoo install took awhile [like a week] to really get working right.)

I remembered to copy off a couple of relevant configs…X, lsmod info, wireless.opts. Maybe a couple of others. But guess what? I used wireless.opts b/c it was the easiest way to put back in the WEP info…but I didn’t need ANY OF THEM. D-I just freakin’ worked. Full hardware detection; X, DRI acceleration for X, audio, USB, PCMCIA…as far as I can tell, no errors. Suh-weet! Less than an hour after I popped in the CD, I was through the install, upgraded from testing to unstable (with a little experimental thown in for good measure…hey, it’s the laptop; might as well play!), and had GNOME 2.6 installing. I am impressed.

Good job, D-I guys! Now I just have to remember to send in an installation report. Back to “Debian Everywhere”…and I couldn’t be happier.