Basilisk is running fine. Still a little hot, but I'm not sure how I can address that without replacing my power supply, putting in water cooling, or some other drastic measure.

So I finally converted over to the new machine, and I wanted to put some sort of Linux onto pyrallis, so it could host my web site, e-mail, CVS, etc. Those things Linux is good at. I'd heard good things about Debian (and never tried it myself), so that's what I installed. First off, finding ISO images on debian.org was a pain. I didn't know what version I was looking for, and the netinst ISO mirrors seemed to all be down. There is this tool called jigdo which lets you make your own ISO images (?), so I gave it a shot. I ran it, saw a bunch of text and stuff I didn't want to deal with, and immediately deleted it. *Finally* I found a netinst ISO for Debian Woody (3.0?). The install was okay... not so horrible that I couldn't get through it, but really annoying in how many stupid questions it asked me. (The best was "Do you want to install a MIME type for application/* ?") Once everything was installed, it basically worked fine. Except for the fact that all of the software was ancient. kernel 2.2 (I couldn't get 2.4 to install for some reason), gcc 2.95, GNOME 1.4, KDE 2.something. Bleh. Simply bland. Most people I know run Debian testing or unstable, so I decided to give that a shot. Here's how:

  • Change 'stable' with 'testing' in /etc/apt/sources.list
  • apt-get update
  • apt-get upgrade
  • Answer insipid questions about packages I probably don't care about
  • Watch as hundreds of megabytes is downloaded and installed, coming back every now and then to answer more stupid questions. (Why can't it download everything, *then* ask, then install?)
  • Reboot
  • Curse at the kernel panic on boot

Upgrading rendered my system useless! So I went through the process again, trying to play around a little bit less. The next time, it booted, but KDE just went away! I guess they are in the process of updating the KDE packages, because they all were incompatible versions, preventing it from working at all. Around then I decided Debian was not for me.

I was so close to just installing Win2K or 2K3 Server, when I thought I'd at least give SuSE 9.0. SuSE was the first distro I ever installed (5.3?) and my alarm clock still has a "Powered by SuSE" sticker on it. And I'm glad I did! It's AWESOME! It's the closest I've ever come to a painless Linux experience! Instead of asking stupid questions, the installer asked me things like "We have detected that you have a USB controller. Would you like USB support?" Yes! Woo hoo! It's very pretty too. The new KDE and X and whatever else is involved look great. YaST (the system control panel) is a godsend. SaX makes configuring my X server a piece of cake. Even enabling IMAP (once I figured out I needed encrypted passwords) and Samba was easy. It has great package management too, including packages for boost and subversion. SuSE is the BMW of Linux distributions. I'm sure I could find more things to praise, but you should just go try it out. Get the 18 MB netinst ISO and install from that.

(Note: andy had a bit of trouble with the ATI video drivers, but I think he got it working.)