This past weekend I installed Debian 2.2 on my desktop
machine. This time I was pretty careful not to mess up
Windows. This machine has a whole bunch of stuff in it:
three HDs, CD burner, network card, sound and modem.
The installation went pretty smoothly. At first I was afraid
to mess up the MBR so I set up LILO on a floppy. I had saved
all the configuration info from RH so I was able to reuse
lilo.conf (except that I made one mistake and I wiped out
the System.map file in the /boot partition). This file is
only used to debug the kernel, but occasionally I get errors
that this file is in the wrong format. I'll have to find
another copy of it, or else I'll have to try and recompile
the kernel to create it.
The next challenge was to get the network working. Although
everything was configured properly, I wasn't able to ping my
other machine. I saw the lights blink, but the ARP tables
remained empty.
After poking around for a while, I just decided to take the
isapnp.conf I had set up under RH and put it in /etc. Once I
did that and I restarted pnp stuff the network came up.
Wahoo!
So now I can start and set up dialup and few other things.
I'm trying to use Gnome with WindowMaker and I need to find
a nice compromise for the look. It's a bit ugly right now.
I used WindowMaker before RH came with the Gnome/E
combination. I prefer the look of WindowMaker it's classier.
The cool thing about Debian is that you get to learn a lot
more of what goes on in the system (like this ARP stuff that
I completely forgot about).
Tomorrow I'll work on the modem and the sound...