Net install is easier than ever. The language support looks impressive as well.
The king of old junk has been at it again and I can report that Sarge still works on modest hardware. This seems obvious from distributions like Feather that are based on Debian, but it's not obvious that things will work well without much effort. I installed to a couple of very old laptops a week ago. I used a surrogate system with a fast CDROM to put the base install and pcmcia packages on, then did the rest over wifi. Task select was left blank and then dselect or aptitude was used to get X and other packages. My favorite install was to a Thinkpad 560, a 130MHz P1 with 24MB of RAM! It has no CD, floppy or USB and is very thin and light and uses little power. Sound, suspend, XFCE4 worked but Firefox was a little slow. I bumped up the RAM to 72 MB and both Firefox and Konqueror work great but the suspend flunked out. That particular laptop uses a msdos partition to suspend and was originally not supposed to take more than 64MB of RAM. I suspect this is the problem, though it may be that my dos partion is too small now. The net install was very helpful. The smaller the install image file is, the less that can go wrong. On Monday 13 June 2005 03:22 pm, John Hebert wrote: > If you haven't tried the new Debian installer yet, > give it a shot! I am impressed. > > http://www.debian.org > > John
