thelinuxlink.net

After 21 months, it's finally here. And it's already outdated.

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=04155
http://www.debian.org/News/2007/20070408

Wally Balljacker wrote:After 21 months, it's finally here. And it's already outdated.

"TASTE THE MAJOR SUCKAGE YOU FUCKING NERD!!!"

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p713bNaO4A

in a few days i upgrade to lenny , which is testing

allix wrote:in a few days i upgrade to lenny , which is testing

Yeah, there hasn't been much movement in testing/unstable lately. I'm hoping that Linux 2.6.20 and GNOME 2.18 make it in soon. The entire Debian archive has pretty much been frozen since December.

I have been loving Etch. Sure, it's GNOME 2.14 rather than 2.18, but honestly, those GNOME point releases are pretty thin on features sometimes. In any event, Etch with GNOME 2.14 has been working really, really well for me. Stable and fast. I am seriously thinking about replacing one of my desktops with Etch. It's already on my Thinkpad and works perfectly.

Chess wrote:I have been loving Etch. Sure, it's GNOME 2.14 rather than 2.18, but honestly, those GNOME point releases are pretty thin on features sometimes.

GNOME != Feature

Chess wrote:It's already on my Thinkpad and works perfectly.

Chess, just curious, does it install a power management daemon by default or do you need to do that yourself? I know the guys at SUSE developed this things called powersaved with KPowersave as the KDE frontend.

By power management do you mean cpu frequency stepping? If so, it's using powernowd and cpufrequtils and those were installed by default (I choose the "laptop" set of packages during install). But, it works great. I am using the gnome-power-manager and gnome CPU applet and it scales up and down depending on usage.

Everything is working fine, suspend, ati graphics, atheros wifi, 1400x1050, all the nifty thinkpad buttons (most of those are controlled by the BIOS, though). Etch is nice.

Chess wrote:By power management do you mean cpu frequency stepping? If so, it's using powernowd and cpufrequtils and those were installed by default (I choose the "laptop" set of packages during install). But, it works great. I am using the gnome-power-manager and gnome CPU applet and it scales up and down depending on usage.

Yeah, CPU scaling, and everything related to saving battery life and all that good stuff.

I assume you downloaded either the netinst ISO or standard CD1 ISO (Please specify which one?). Right now I'm messing around with the KDE install CD, which is 650 MBs, it doesn't ask me what to install during the installation, it just installs a predefined set of packages. I would imagine the GNOME install CD (Standard CD1) being the same way, same thing goes for the Xfce install CD. The netinst disc I could image as different.

Chess wrote:Everything is working fine, suspend, ati graphics, atheros wifi, 1400x1050, all the nifty thinkpad buttons (most of those are controlled by the BIOS, though). Etch is nice.

On Debian, when you choose desktop in the installer , your get gnome, there is not choice for kde.

Tsuroerusu wrote:I assume you downloaded either the netinst ISO or standard CD1 ISO (Please specify which one?).

On my Thinkpad, I had used the netinstall disk a few months ago and have been upgrading via apt-get ever since. It's now running Etch final. On one of my workstations, I used the disk 1 Edgy final that I downloaded yesterday. In both cases, GNOME is the default desktop. I don't remember being asked whether to install a different DE, however, if you choose minimal install and don't select the "Desktop" configuration, then I imagine it does not install any graphical environment in which you can apt-get KDE or whatever later.

Chess wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:I assume you downloaded either the netinst ISO or standard CD1 ISO (Please specify which one?).

On my Thinkpad, I had used the netinstall disk a few months ago and have been upgrading via apt-get ever since. It's now running Etch final. On one of my workstations, I used the disk 1 Edgy final that I downloaded yesterday. In both cases, GNOME is the default desktop. I don't remember being asked whether to install a different DE, however, if you choose minimal install and don't select the "Desktop" configuration, then I imagine it does not install any graphical environment in which you can apt-get KDE or whatever later.

Actually, I love the netinst ISO. I did what you were describing Chess. I used the netinst ISO about a week ago on a system with only 128megs of ram and a 667mhz CPU. So I wanted a lite install. I installed "base", and "file server" packages which gave me a basic system without a GUI install. Then I did the following:

apt-get install x-window-system
This installed all of the x system and asked one set up question about resolutions, that I wanted to use.

apt-get install ion2
This gave me my perferred lightweight window manager. From there I have installed the GTK apps that I want to use day to day, and also the CLI apps that I prefer to use most of the time on this older machine.

I love this set up because I have a CLI log in, and a nice clean machine without lots of extras that I don't plan on using. In probably less than 2 hours you can have a rather workable system kind of setup the way I want it without lots of bling bling.

By the way, if you want to get a text only log in, but you have installed the desktop system and it installed gdm as well, there is a cool tool called rcconf. It is an ncurses program that lets you select what you want init to start up. Then you just uncheck gdm and you now boot up to the CLI. Just "apt-get install rcconf" then run as root.