I was able to get home and eat a quick dinner (chips, salsa, and 2 cheese burritos, plus a Monster Low Carb Energy Drink) and get the two lawns (ours and our neighbors) cut just as darkness fell. I walked Little Man and a quick shower soon followed. With all the mandatory chores complete, it was time to see how the OS install (Debian Linux) on Maximus turned out.
I rebooted the PC after upgrading the BIOS (which was pre-Y2k) and was greeted with the proper log on screen. I logged on and everything appeared to be working. I was connected to the net and was able to view various web sites. Setting up the machine for FTP, ssh, and other things would come later since I was tired and still had some bills to enter in the other PC. With that in mind, I shut down Maximus and fired up the other PC and entered my bills. When I was done entering bills, I had a little time so I figured that I would tweak Maximus a bit until I went to bed. I fired him and once GDM loaded the log on screen, I knew there was a problem. The resolution was and 800 x 600 instead of the 1280 x 1020 that I am used to. I ran "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" as root to reset the config file, using the auto detect and the defaults...all worked well. I restarted GDM and my desktop was back.
I also noticed that my FAT32 drive was not mounted (I had mounted it before with the Gnome tool) so I mounted it again. I rebooted to check and it again was working as normal.
I read that Automatix now works on Debian, so I got the .deb file from the site. I jumped to a command prompt, changed to root and ran dpkg -i $automatix_file_name.deb and installed the app. All was well. I did not have much that I wanted from Automatix (at this point, anyway) but it does have a few neat things I could use later.
One of the few things it has I was wanting to try was the Azureus bit torrent client. It took a little tweaking but I finally managed to get it installed and configured. I had to run it as root to get the update to take, but that was not a big deal. I tested it and it downloaded a test iso image, which I deleted since I did not need it. Now at least I have a workign BT client.
I would have preferred to use the original BitTorrent client, but the site was not allowing me to download it so I opted for Azureus. I cannot see what the big deal is about that client. It seems a bit bloated just to seed or download files.
I then configured SSH/SSH server so now I can connect to it remotely. That is one of the few things that went seamlessly...not that the others were difficult...they just did not run "out of the box". I actually do not mind jumping to a command line to edit my sources.list or any other config file.
By this time I was getting tired (actually I was falling asleep at the keyboard) so I decided to hit the hay.
I can say that I am impressed with Debian 4, aka "Etch" so far as a desktop. I am not quite a "noob" but I am far an admin. Everything I did was pretty easy to do, albeit some of it was from the command line...something new Linux users tend to avoid.
The one odd thing (I noticed this on my Mepis install as well) is that the networkmanager icon shows the the network is not available, but I can communicate between machines and get out on the web without problems. This started after the second reboot.
Most likely there will be more to come on this topic.
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