Comments on The Perfect Desktop - Debian Etch (Debian 4.0)

The Perfect Desktop - Debian Etch (Debian 4.0) With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. In this tutorial I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Debian Etch in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that runs also on older hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

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By:

finally...a great walkthrough to get the Deb OS up and running..not being familiar with apt-get and options this proved invaluable in getting an system up and running.. ..thx again.

By:

Do you really need 9 seperate media players, 2 mail clients, 3 cd-burning apps, 4 web browsers, and 4 bittorrent clients (including opera and gtorrent)? No.

By: admin

This is just for demonstration purposes. Of course, you can install all the software, but you can also pick only the software that you need. The tutorial just shows how to install all software, but it's up to you which software you install.

By:

I came to that conclusion. Kind of made me snicker though. It is a great write up, dont get me wrong! But it just seemed like it could have been summed up with "Install Debian then get Automatix."

By:

Personally, I feel you should have added a third partition of /home. It's one of the good qualities of Linux that should not be left out for simplicity sake... It takes a little more work during the installation process but the end result is an easier to upgrade system.

No windows nor gates, yet complete freedom! 

By:

I didn't know about automagix before reading your howto. It looks promising. Unfortunately I found out that this tutorial only works for i386, not amd64, since automagix2 is not supporting amd64 on debian etch (yet). Perhaps it's good to mention this in the howto.
I assume that it's not a good idea to point to the gutsy sources for automagix2 (which do support amd64), or do you think there is no harm in trying that, i.e. mixing distributions?

By: fonok

Usefull things at boot prompt:

DO NOT press Enter !

say: install tasks="kde-desktop" - if you want KDE instead of Gnome

sometimes acpi makes problems (I had with netinstall CD on a 'barebone' type PC):

say: install acpi=off

By: fonok

and of course:

say: install tasks="no-desktop"

if you do not want to have any desktop - e.g. server setup