Well,
the saga continues.. I checked out the resources mentioned by the wonderful
folks here at SLUG and then looked at the system that was running Win2k
which was the original target for Debian and stared at the hotch potch
collection of old, brand new, and somewhat dubious hardware running an AMD
k6-2 450 and cosidered teh fact that after much tweaking and playing around
I've finally got it to play my DVD's at an acceptable rate :-)
Then I looked at the brand spanking new HP Celeron 566 less than a month old
for work and in less time than it took you to say "I wonder" the Partition
Magic disk was produced and partitions were being resized and moved left,
right and centre. After some seemingly never ending waits whilst PM went
about it's work we had some unused partitions.
During the lengthy waits for PM I'd stumbled across an old two cd
LinuxCentral set of Debian 2.1 and low and behold it actually turned into a
4CD set complete with source.. Looks like I wasn't a complete Debian newbie
after all... well I at least had a CD :-)
A couple of aborted install attempts later I gave up. Dual booting wasn't
for me. Any normal individual would have ended the story there, but not a
fearless (or maybe that should be senseless) SLUGGER such as myself.
In a moment not unlike the Blues Brothers scene where Jake sees the light. I
was struck by a light from the gods (that sounded suspiciously like someone
saying "I pronounce linux as linux") and saw upon the screen my salvation.
Deliverance was at hand (and not just a copy on video either) and I read the
words "all data on this disk will be destroyed" and I knew I was saved (well
at least I hoped everything I wanted was saved to the network drive :-))
One hit of the enter key and another bit of deft partitioning and we were
set then an EN-MASS selection of almost every package and there followed a
frenzy of cd and hard drive activity the likes of which hadn't been seen
since my last windows box swapped itself into oblivion...
Finally after answering a number of questions (quite a large number
actually) and seeming to hit the default answer a disturbing number of times
it was done. Disk were removed and systems were reboot and then we had it, a
working (well sort of) Debian 2.1 system.. Woo Hoo and to think not a life
was lost. Alas my fun had to end as I had a training session to attend. But
on tommorrow's schedule is trying to get X (a decidely archaic version no
doubt) working with the Intel 810 chipset.. yeah right... :-) So imagine
some updating will be in order there other than that I'll have to
investigate this apt that everyone seems to be talking about.. It does exist
on 2.1 doesn't it?? :-)
Then maybe we'll see how it works on an upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2 then maybe
Infinity and beyond.....
I'll keep you posted. maybe even next time from silentbob (the debian box)
Dan.
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