[PLUG] Update on My Debian Progress

["Michael F. Robbins" <mike@gamerack.com>]

Ah, finally tonight my system is to such a point of usability that I can get my e-mail again. ;-) 

For anyone that is interested:  I started with a plain Debian Woody install.  I custom-compiled kernel 2.4.17, from a config I had made before with RedHat.  Works great.  I didn't use make-kpkg or anything, as I really didn't want to spend the time and didn't see the benefit. 

I have an NVIDIA GeForce card.  Grabbed source tarballs from NVidia's site, compiled, works great.  Actually, I think my Quake III frames per second have gone up!  I really can't explain that, but I really think they have.  Yes, I know that there are some Debian packages for setting up the NVidia modules, but after playing with them unsucessfully, I just did what I had done before on redhat.  And it works great. 

Oh, and of course installed my Q3A.  No problems there ;-) 

I used apt-get to install KDE, which is what I am using as my desktop.  There was a small dependency problem in installing SSL support for KDE, which involved using dpkg --force-overwrite once, but I'm sure that this will be resolved soon.  And it was quite simple to resolve.  (Two KDE packages claim the same file: just overwrite it.) 

I grabbed StarOffice 5.2, and had no problems installing it.  Works great for schoolwork. 

Apt-getted CUPS (Common Unix Printing System, the focus of waltman's upcoming April presentation).  I'd seriously recommend CUPS to anyone using any distro -- it makes things very easy. 

Installed (Ximian) Evolution.  This was a (relatively) complicated operation, and yet still took all of maybe 15 minutes.  Went to debian.org, saw evolution package in SID (the unstable tree).  Looked at dependency list.  Installed as much as I could from testing.  For the other 3 packages, again found dependencies manually.  Downloaded, did dpkg -i evolution_blablabla.deb.  Works great! 

So basically, I'm now 100% using Debian for everyday use.  And yes, I did figure out how to install to RAID (slightly complicated, e-mail me for details).  And while sometimes I had to get down and dirty with /etc files and manually resolving dependencies for some weird packages (Evolution), the simplicity of apt-get really helped. 

Here are some Deb-specific commands that I've found very helpful: 
apt-get update Gets latest package list from servers 
apt-get upgrade Grabs&installs latest packages (do update first) 
apt-get install foo Grabs&installs package foo 
apt-get remove foo Removes foo, but leaves config files 
apt-cache search foo Searches package lists for "foo" 
apt-cache show foo Shows package information for (uninstalled) pkg "foo" 
dpkg -i whatever.deb Installs the package contained in whatever.deb 
dpkg -L foo List files associated with package foo 
dpkg --contents whatever.deb Show files in (uninstalled) pkg file 
update-rc.d Look this up in a man page.  Anyway, its useful for setting runlevel-specific stuff. 

I'm sure you all have many more tricks, but this is good enough for me right now.  If anyone would like more information on how I switched to Debian, please e-mail me.  And even though I spent about a whole week in transition, it was worth it.  I feel so good inside every time "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" installs a new update! 

Michael F. Robbins 
mike@gamerack.com