As you may well know, I have been an exponent and fan of debian for many years. Not any more...
I decided to convert all of my servers to run virtually on a single system, I've purchased nice big toys, and after a lot of tribulations, got them all working. Base setup is 4x320GB SATA2 drives, 2GB memory, all driven by a dual core 64bit amd processor. Took a bit of getting working - the bios had to interfere with the boot sequence with it's 'RAID' controller: the solution os to set them up as jbpd and it'll find the disks - and there were cabling issues with the case, but I'm now ready to install a 64 bit linux. Wanted to use sarge, but there isn't a version available, so went for etch, which is the new name for testing. Downloaded the latest net install CD, any built up the system. All went fine until I try to start up a graphical interface. X is fine, but there's nothing else there. I've got the default twm, but no gnome, and no kde either. apt-get install gnome fails with dependencies. so does kde. So I try the bleeding edge version. Same deal. WTF? It seems there's a problem with the printer subsystem, and it's currently impossible to install a 64 bit amd version of debian if you want a gui. Given the press they've been getting lately, I'd say that it's time to move on. So, like some other distros, I'm downloading Ubuntu as my base system. Hopefully I can remove their silly security system and use it how a server should be used ( I did look for a server version - sure there used to be one around ). I'll ley you know how I get on with this foray into the 64 bit world, or if I give up and return to 32 bit sanity instead. Cheers, Steve
