[lug] debian

[David Morris]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 02:26:47PM -0600, Peter Hutnick wrote:
> Hugh Brown said:
> > I'm beginning to play with debian and haven't had a whole lot of luck.
> >
> > I did a net install with the floppies and got woody installed.
> > Unfortunately, it doesn't know what to do with my video card (Nvidia Ge
> > Force 2 Go) nor my wireless card.
> >
> > I tried dselect'ing a 2.4 kernel but every time I boot into it, the
> > system won't respond to keyboard input.
> >
> > I added testing to my sources.list and did a dist-upgrade.  Booting into
> > the 2.4 kernel still got my to a system that wouldn't respond to
> > keyboard input.
> 
> At the risk of setting off the Debianistas, this is not an atypical "end
> user" experience with Debian.
> 
> Debian focuses on Freedom and (extreme) stability.  These are admirable,
> but make it hard on a guy who is hoping to run contemporary hardware and
> have it "just work."

See my other post for details, but this is not quite the
correct reason the hardware doesn't "just work" out of the
box.  The support in this case *is already there* (though
the NVidia drivers are better), but they are not loaded by
default.  This creates a much cleaner and faster system, at
the expense of more needed user knowledge.  There are
HOWTOs, FAQs, and guides all over the place to give the tiny
bit of extra knowledge needed if you just look for it.

I have yet to find any hardware that runs on RH that cannot
run on Debian.  95% of the time all you have to do is load
the appropriate module (which is already installed)....the
other 5% of the time, Linux support is so iffy in the first
place, not even RH can get it to "just work" for a novice
user.

--David


--David