[r a n d o m h u m a n]

5 weeks I waited for these distributions to be delivered, and what do I get? One distro crippled by lack of software, and another crippled by lack of a GUI!

Debian (woody). Crude (but functional) installer, old kernels, but I thought at least I’d have something familiar to work with straight away, even if it was a little outdated. I had all the questions answered, all the software installed, and ready to land with my feet firmly in the K desktop, when I was greeted by the dreaded “3-flickers” (I had the same problem with my laptop until I got Ben Herrenschmidt’s ibook kernel. Ben, you’re a legend). I thought maybe the radeon drivers were too old for my brand-spanking-new (I guess?) radeon 9800SE (agpgart wouldn’t install either…), so I added a testing apt source and got the highest 2.4 kernel available (2.4.27). But I think that made it worse.

SuSE (9.1 personal), on the other hand, has an entirely graphical installer where more or less everything is autodetected. And a 2.6 kernel. I was exploring KDE and YaST in 20 minutes, tops. This is how things should work, I thought, despite all the puke-green splash screens in place of the usual, sleek, scrolling white text on a black background during the boot process. That is, until I decided I’d quite like to use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email-client, and discovered that it wasn’t included, nor was there any way to download a binary package. apt-rpm seemed like a fine solution, but while there was a binary rpm available for that, one of its dependencies needed to be compiled from source. No problem. Except that SuSE9.1 Personal doesn’t include gcc…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2004 at 2:06 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.