Debian 5.0!

Fantastic, it works!

Was released on Saturday 14th Feb (they say). I was looking for it on Saturday but did not get it. On Sunday, I saw it was released.

On my Compaq presario 2701T laptop (2001), running kubuntu (+xubuntu), I decided to try Debian 5.0 "lenny".

This time around, I tried something different. Installed unetbootin, and did a netinstall of Debian 5.0 "lenny", on a pre-existing partition.

By default, xfce was installed. I then did install a KDE desktop - aptitude helps.

Amazingly I did not have to do much for getting my wireless (Trendnet PCMCIA card TEW421PC) work - this has been a problem with almost all the distributions (including ubuntu). While I had to do a "ndiswrapper" thing on kubuntu, on lenny it started working right away. Only thing I had to do was to provide the credentials of my network.

Was a little confused when I could not find firefox/thunderbird (aptitude search). After a bit of looking around (synpatic) installed Icedove, Iceweasel was already installed.

Sound does not work on my laptop, not sure if it is a hardware problem or it is my configuration.

Open SUSE 11, KDE First Day

Downloaded the 64bit, liveCD version of Open SUSE 11 via Bit torrent. Took more than 3 hours to download (first day!)

Installation went without much problems, very user friendly installation interface.

Only problem was after reboot, the system refused to boot via grub. Took a little while to figure out what was happening (as I was not expecting nothing to go wrong). Found that the grub menu.lst was misconfigured (got configured as (hd1,x), instead of (hd0,x)) on my two hard disk, multi-OS desktop. Cant blame, for not being able to set it up right for the complex configuration I have.

Here are some observations.

• Comes with perl 5.10, which is great.
• No problem with X on my nvidia (there was no problem in Open SUSE 10.2/3 either)
• KDE4... had a couple crashes already in my 1hour or so of usage! Had tried KDE4 on OpenSUSE 10.3, dint work well, had given up and backed up to KDE 3.5.x. Hoping that is not going to be the case again.
  
• Hate the width of the bottom panel, I reduced it to the minimum size (there is no customized size). Also the font size of the clock. Adding date with year, time with seconds helped.
  
• Not the latest released version of Firefox. I think it is some 3.0b5. At one point while accessing one of the website realized the flash needs to be installed. Just clicking on the buttons, took me to the adobe's website and got installed flawlessly.
  
• Try to install anything from the network using yast, din't work. Either because of the network congestion or because of the yast configuration.
• Haven't tried any 3D stuff, not sure if I can with the hardware I have.

Kubuntu UUID

Already written this before? once again..., the command for getting UUID on kubuntu

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid