About a month ago I installed Debian testing amd64 on a new hard disk, keeping my old Jaunty hard disk untouched. Unfortunately, I messed up the window manager and could not get it repaired after several days of poking. I reinstalled the Jaunty hard disk to get some work done, but now I am back reinstalling Debian testing.
This time it has taken only two days to get to the point where almost everything is working as it was in Jaunty. And no messed up window manager (yet). Now, I know someone is going to ask why I would bother to move to Debian if everything was working in Jaunty. I have two motivations: 1) It is time to move on. I have used Ubuntu exclusively since Breezy and have little experience beyond Ubuntu. I feel great that I am now using a real distro without the Ubuntu training wheels. 2) I spend a lot of time in Scribus, a major application in my life. The Scribus developers mince few words in expressing their dislike of Ubuntu. Apparently the Ubuntu people do things to Qt, which Scribus depends on. This causes a great number of bug reports that they cannot do anything about. Reading the Scribus e-list you finally conclude that the three most respected distros by the Scribus developers are Fedora, Debian, and OpenSuse. I loves me my Synaptic, so Debian is the #1 option. I still have a few issues to resolve: 1) I installed VLC 1.0.2 Goldeneye from the repos, but the display is scrunched up to the left 1/4 of the window. Someone else on the debian-user list reported the same problem, but no one can do much at the moment because the VideoLan wiki and forums are offline. They took them offline deliberately because of the high volume after releasing version 1.0. Luckily I don't need VLC often. 2) Can't figure out how to install Xara Extreme. I found the instructions on the Xara website, but I didn't understand them and I'm sure I never went through all that stuff when I installed it on Ubuntu. Again, luckily, I rarely use it. 3) Thanks to a message from a power user on the CUPS e-list I migrated all my printer drivers with a few mouse clicks. But I haven't tested them yet. 4) I have no wireless at home, so I need to go someplace to test the wireless. The installer found it and offered to set it up as the primary network interface, but I told it to use eth0 instead. And now ifconfig doesn't even report the existence of the wireless. 5) Most important - I still haven't figured out how to get my bluetooth mouse working. I think the problem is in Debian because several of the buttons in the GUI do nothing at all. Like click on Setup New Device and nothing happens. I can find it from the command line with hcitool, but the connect command fails to connect it, even though the command executes without error. In spite of the issues, I'm pretty happy with Debian testing. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
