Well, I just sent my l33t points through the roof. I went to Greg’s to fix his SuSE install. We fixed it and hadn’t even spent five minutes discussing how evil KDE was before we decided to format his disk and install Debian. It took us all fucking night.

Why did Greg have SuSE in the first place when Debian is a far superior distro? Well, because Debian sucks to install. It asks too many challenging questions and it doesn’t give the user enough context information during the dpkg-configure phase. Worst of all, if you manage to get a working base system installed you’re suddenly left on your own! No networking, if you get networking there’s no DHCP. There’s no XFree, let alone GNOME. To fix all this you head to APT, Debian’s killer app (it makes the OS, really). You try to install an app and it works, but this doesn’t help. Greg and I tried installing a GNOME app or two to see if the dependency tree would require the install of a full system - a technique that has worked for me before. But not this time. We were forced to spend literally hours trawling through packages.debian.org, finding packages, installing them, seeing what bits of the system came along.

In case you’re wondering if you do something like:

apt-get install x-window-system-core sawfish gdm gnome-control-center gnome-session galeon nautilus evolution

You should get a fairly functional desktop system. But this won’t give you a fully usable Linux system, just a GUI really. From there you’ve still got to install the little things, like GIMP, Vim or sudo.

What was wrong with the task system? It served a purpose and I can’t see what the problem was with it all. Woody (Debian 3) has a tasksel app but the only tasks included are useless. One was called desktop system, but this failed to installed the GUI components we desired.

Bad show Debian volunteers.

I can barely move my hands now…