Debian 6

[Edward]

I managed to get the AMD Athlon 600 MHz box up and running again, with Debian 6 (Squeeze). Had to tweak the BIOS settings to match the hard drive and CD-ROM and also had to switch CD-ROM drives due to problems reading the CD, but I finally managed to get it installed.

Not a bad Linux distro.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.10 Chromium/9.0.597.107 Chrome/9.0.597.107 Safari/534.13

[Don_HH2K]

I'm still running Debian 5 on my P1 server, only because I've heard reports that the automatic upgrade process from Debian 5 to Debian 6 can break Apache and MySQL. Most likely I'll wait until I have time to do a clean install of 6 on that machine, as it runs my e-mail and I can't deal with it being down for very long. In the meantime though, I do plan on clean-installing 6 on my desktop, which at the moment is between OSes.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110309 Firefox/4.0b13pre

[Antony]

Why are you using Apache and MySQL? Didn't you use Microsoft IIS for your website?

In the meantime though, I do plan on clean-installing 6 on my desktop, which at the moment is between OSes.

When you say your desktop, do you mean your HP Compaq nx6325 laptop? And you are running it with multiple OSes?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.0 Firefox/3.6.15

[Don_HH2K]

I've told you countless times that my mail server runs Linux, but I guess you used your incorrect stereotype to assume I was running a Microsoft product.

I actually meant I'd be doing a clean install on my Athlon XP tower at some point. I found it in the garbage last year and started using it after I finally sold the Sun Microsystems machine. This was rather recent so at the moment that machine has no OS running on it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS i86pc; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080303 SeaMonkey/1.1.8

[Antony]

I've told you countless times that my mail server runs Linux, but I guess you used your incorrect stereotype to assume I was running a Microsoft product.

Actually, I remember that you u se Linux for mail, but why do you need Apache and MySQL for mail?

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[Don_HH2K]

I use AfterLogic WebMail so that I can check my e-mail on machines without an IMAP client installed, and for some unknown reason it needs MySQL.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110309 Firefox/4.0b13pre

[Antony]

And you sold Sun Microsystems machine?

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[Don_HH2K]

Yes, but due to driver restraints it wasn't possible to run Debian with X11 on that machine.

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[Edward]

Yesterday, Ubuntu 11.04 (64-bit) decided it didn't want to work anymore. Something happened to the XFCE desktop, nothing could be moved or closed, once a piece of software was opened. Nice.

I then put Debian 6 (64-bit, amd64 kernel) on the 64-bit system and it's running fine.

The only Ubuntu installation remaining now, is on my laptop.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20110429 Iceweasel/3.5.16 (like Firefox/3.5.16)

[Antony]

(...) nothing could be moved or closed, once a piece of software was opened. Nice.

It sounds like a warrant for reboot, and if the reboot still fails, it means a death certificate.

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[Edward]

The same occurred after a reboot, so I suspect something went wrong with the software. I received an e-mail from a colleague that said in general, the reviews of Ubuntu 11.04 have not been good.

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[Edward]

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place tonight with the successful installation of Debian 6 (Squeeze) on my ThinkPad laptop.

No more 'buntu.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20110430 Iceweasel/3.5.16 (like Firefox/3.5.16)

[iJohnE]

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place tonight with the successful installation of Debian 6 (Squeeze) on my ThinkPad laptop.

No more 'buntu.

Good for you. When it comes to Linux I've been using the Debian edition of Linux Mint.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

[Edward]

What was occurring was the installer would appear to hang after trying to detect the network hardware. I learned it had successfully detected the network hardware, however since the screen did not change, I thought at first that it was having a problem with the Intel 2915ABG (wireless). So I had to press Alt-F4 to see the console messages. They were all related to fd0, which would be a floppy drive, but one does not exist on the laptop, the configuration did not come with one. So I had to dig into the BIOS to see if the floppy could be disabled, I eventually found it, and once disabled and the laptop rebooted, the installer worked perfectly after that.

I had to enable the "non-free" repository in order to download and install firmware-ipw2x00 which is required for the Intel 2915ABG, then had to manually edit a file and once dbus was rebooted after all that, everything else fell into place and I configured the wireless using wicd.

With Debian, the release cycles are generally a year and a half apart. I was getting tired of upgrading a distro every six months with all the others I used in the past. You don't need the latest-and-greatest all the time, so if what you have works, stick with it.

I immediately discovered that Debian 6 runs faster on the laptop, compared to Ubuntu 11.04.

Another benefit to wicd, is that it also displays the other wireless networks in the neighborhood (that are powered on at the time) and it also displays the router channels those networks are using. With 802.11G routers, channels 1, 6 and 11 do not overlap with the other channels and there are numerous articles online that recommend using one of those three channels. I plan on changing it to either 1 or 6 since another network was also listed as using channel 11, but my router which is 802.11N has a separate 5GHz network with a much wider range of channels, as the 2915ABG will also work on the 5GHz side, I may experiment with that side of the router to see how it does.

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