The Saga Continues

WuTang! WuTang!
My last post involved some fun and games with Linux distributions. Well, it continues.

I had Ubuntu (Gutsy) on my junk laptop. As I said before, I'm not digging Ubuntu. This machine is primarily an interweb browser. It's an old Compaq I got from a friend. The laptop itself works pretty well except for the extremely loud fans. I've tried mucking with the settings to quiet the thing down, but it really gets that hot as I found out during an install of Debian Etch.

The fam and I went to the bookstore, and I picked up one of those magazines that's basically just a distro with some poorly written text. This one was pink and it had the most recent Debian release with all three DVDs. I probably could have downloaded and burned them, but there's a point at which you have to say: "what is my time worth?" Besides that, it's nice to give some money to someone that's not Microsoft every now and then. I figured I could learn something from the text too, but that didn't really happen.

The installation is way more dumbed down than the last time I remember installing Debian. There isn't much in the way of package selection at the installation stage anymore. I figured I'd give encrypted partitions a shot too. The format was taking forever for the encryption. The fans started spinning louder and louder.
And louder...

It died. The machine just shut down. I restarted after a couple of hours and tried again. This time I left the encryption out. It installed, I ran it, and it was good.
Fedora 9 on the other laptop was starting to frustrate me. I wanted to add some new repos, but the Software Configuration utility has no add feature. That's kinda weird. Why would they do that? I probably could have edited a sources file or something. There were other things bothering me that escape me now. I do like Fedora though. Probably because I started my Linux life on RedHat and have most of my experience with it. Debian would be the number two on that list.

I liked Debian so much on the junk machine, I decided to wipe the Fedora and go for it. I haven't reformatted that machine in a while, and I decided to give the floating partitions thing a whirl. I can't remember what that's called, but the partitions resize as needed. No need for gparted or whatever. That's nice. I did the install, and then got into the struggle with Broadcom for my wireless. This is a problem that is ongoing. The connection is fine, but there's a bug that's reporting an assert issue at startup. It's up and on the interwebs, and it's good.

I have been doing some work on a forum that I started (Dirt Treaders). I wanted to run it on my laptop, so I installed using the "web server" package selection when setting up the Debian install. That was a bad idea. Apache got installed, but I wanted Apache2. Then I installed 2, but it wasn't running even though the services thing said it was. If it was, it wasn't at port 80 on loclahost. I eventually had to uninstall both and re-install 2. Then I couldn't get apachectl running. Turns out there's a apache2ctl that you use. :) Who'd have expected that!!!

It's all up and I have phpBB3 going with a copy of the site. I'm loving Debian. It's always harder to do anything, but I kinda like that. If I start talking about trying Slackware though, someone please stop me!