But I Digress

So, I burned an Etch CD and installed it on my test machine that I use to grade most Linux distros. It’s a Sony VAIO PCG-SR33 notebook. If you can install on this, points for you.

Initially, I was hopeful. It autodetected the pcmcia cdrom without any hacks required, something previous Debian releases did not do, and most Linux distros just don’t do. Only the anaconda installer matched it, and recently they pulled support for this, so that puts Debian ahead.

I threw it a curve by having no network, since I have single pcmcia slot and it was occupied by the cdrom in the install. This also messes up a lot of distros, but Debian was ok, beyond the fact that it left me with a bare /etc/apt/sources.list and I had to populate it myself. I find that sad, it should at least have a full commented-out reference to the US mirror, IMHO.

Install done, I pull out the cdrom and slot in my pcmcia wireless network card. Nothing. Hotplug is supposedly running but the kernel does not activate the card. Sad, truly sad.

So, I reboot, and the card is detected at boot time as eth0. Cool. So I type iwconfig, and see only eth1. Odd. I configure the essid on eth1, run dhclient on it, and the network is up. God knows why eth0 is occupied by something.

I’m able to apt-get update, and run tasksel to choose the laptop and desktop options. It churns away downloading and preparing.

I come back to it, and find a blank screen. Nothing is happening, it seems locked-up. Lovely.

So, I reboot and run dpkg –configure -a to pick up where it left off. That’s what it’s doing now, but I must say that so far, compared to the last install I did, which was CentOS 4.3, I’m underwhelmed. It might be worth it if I can get everything working, since I loooooove Debian, and Ubuntu’s gotten too buggy for me (wouldn’t install at all). Still, after over a year since Sarge, I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to work around brokenness in my first install.

The frontend running from tasksel also had issues. A bunch of packages seem to spew output to /dev/console, messing up the progress bars, and a ctrl-L doesn’t refresh.

Thanks for all the work. I’m sure it would be fine on my desktop, but it’s not doing well yet on this laptop.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.