Hello all, I have managed to install Debian 7.1.0 on an Acer Travelmate 3230, even coping with the binary blobs during the install. It is generally working well, standalone, but now I am looking to sorting out and using now and then networked.
First, I am finding the Gnome 3 series different, and not certain that I either appreciate or like. Any comments about making it behave more "traditionally" appreciated. I may need to remove a great deal and install a lighter desktop, the Notebook is maxed out with 1.5Gig of RAM. Next, comment appreciated about Net-Manager. As I expect to use it on varying networks, the way that it flexibly reconfigures is attractive in places, but I can also see a lot of merit in being able to just set manually for when I use on certain networks. If I do remove Net-Manager, I would appreciate comment about whether the one package is enough, or what else to purge. Some of the support tools may be useful to report when I manually configure, especially to WiFi. The other thing is that CUPS (V 1.5?) will not let me set up a printer at the moment. It searches for printers, and when it does not find any, will not let me install for later use via the administrative interface, either web browser or the printer icon. I am looking at the configuration files, and scratching my head and getting splinters at this stage, for manually editing to configure for the HP LJ 4+/4P that I have, and also a Canon LPB 5050N. When I did the install, I was visiting someone with ADSL, and the install well found the network connection, and even after for the package managers. I did not appreciate the behaviours from the Gnome variant, it did not necessarily apply the changes when I clicked on the button. I did manage to install Synaptic, and that was a lot better behaved, it is more mature software. If I know the package name, I am not averse to using apt in a terminal. I will need to poke around further as IceApe (FireFox) could not find the network while Synaptic had no problems. I am getting my head around which files, what goes in them, and how to modify, along with iptables and the like. The initial install left my user account without sudo access. I have rectified that so I have both full root access, and sudo. They give me ways of doing different things. For a single command that need not be run from a root login, sudo can be much better than an unguarded root login left sitting vulnerable, while some tasks are where I want full root login, at least at this time. Overall 7.1 is reasonably impressive, but I would still appreciate a lighter version. I am inclined to do a base install as a command line only box on something with perhaps a PIII or PII and 256 Mb of RAM, or even less. There are other distros, but there are reasons I am looking at Debian, primarily the apt toolset. Regards, Mark Trickett _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
