[vox] re: a dual boot system?

[Bob Scofield]

On Saturday 11 March 2006 12:55 pm, Bill Kendrick wrote:
>
>
> Debian is free.  SUSE is a commercial Linux distro, now owned by
> Novell.  There is a free version you can download, if I recall correctly.

It's here:  http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org


> I usually start with a small net-install disc (about 100MB?) to install
> the base system.  Then the installer allows me to fetch all of the software
> I want/need right over the DSL.
>
> (So instead of downloading and burning a large set of ISOs, which contains
> 10s of 1000s of packages I _don't_ care about, I'll simply download _only_
> the packages I care about, directly over DSL.)

Right, but this makes me uncomfortable because I may have to take back 
something I said yesterday.  Yesterday I said that Debian was an OS for 
sissies.

I like the Debian net install.  But before you do it, you should (unlike me 
when I first did it):  (1) know about either "apt-get" or "aptitude"; and (2) 
know what packages to download to get your GUI up and running.  That's 
because when the first 100MB comes down, you'll not have a GUI.

(And I even had to get help from this list on how to burn ISO images.)  

Do people here think it's important for someone doing this to know how to do 
MD5sum?

And here's a question I have because I'm planning on doing another Debian net 
install in the next few months.  Debian has replaced base-config with 
tasksel.  So how do you create your sources list now (other than manually) 
during your basic installation? 

Okay, I take it back.  Maybe Debian is not for sissies, but it's gotten easy 
enough for borderline idiots.

Another question asked had to do with other programs.  I cannot live with the 
XMMS music player because I like Internet Radio, and it plays CD's better 
than KSCD.  So if he goes the Debian route and is interested in it he'll have 
to download it.  I think it comes automatically with other distros.

Bob