I had a conversation last week with a new friend of mine, who doesn’t particularly like *buntu, and isn’t that much of a .deb fan in general either, although he has no problem using Debian itself. The conversation went down the lines of how *buntu makes everything quite difficult if you’re spending lots of time in the command line, because they make everything different to what most would call "native Linux" like Fedora, SUSE or even Mandrake (Now Mandriva of course). I explained, that my reason for using *buntu over Debian, was a combination of the cutting edge stuff mentioned earlier and the sheer fact that if I install Debian, I have to spend hours getting the things I want to install, installed, where as in *buntu, it’s just easy. It installs itself quickly (Not something Debian can really claim, even though it is faster than some others), sure the partitioning is bogus, but then you can change that and do it manually. Installing all the stuff you need/want when you’ve installed the OS is simple, most things can be done with apt-get, what can’t, can be downloaded in .deb format and everything really just works, for a desktop machine I’m talking about here, then you simply remove the stuff you don’t want from *buntu and all is well, you’re up and running in no time. He agreed with my logic, but still wasn’t convinced.

Unfortunately I’ve gone and proved myself wrong anyway, and now I’m going to admit to it on the internet! :O

I tested both Natty Narwhal and Debian Squeeze this weekend in a VM, only about 30 minutes each to be fair, but that was enough to make me start thinking about switching back to Debian. I once wrote a blog post about Debian Etch and how awesome it was, so enthusiastic was I, that Distro Watch and Debian both used the review as one they were proud to point to, similar things happened in my review of Lenny a couple of years ago too. Now I’m going to have to do one on Squeeze, because to be perfectly honest, it’s just awesome. It installs quicker than ever before, which is really simple to do as well, the ability to start in easy install mode, then switch to expert when you decide you don’t like the partitioning it’s creating, or you realise you want to install the web server now, not later, is legendary. On top of it’s speedy installation time, it actually installed in my VM, where Ubuntu did not, even after enabling 3D support and upping the memory available for graphics in the VM, Natty would not even run from the live CD, let alone install. This was a big plus for Debian Squeeze and a big fat FAIL for Ubuntu, if I can’t test it in a VM, I’m unlikely to use it as my desktop OS. Once you get past the Debian installation, there’s the configuration to look forward to, yes I said look forward to! Not only do most things apt-get now, but the installer even asks you if you want to enable the unsupported and non-free repo’s, I’m sure it never used to do that.

Firefox and NVidia drivers still seem to be manual install only, but then I don’t like the NVidia drivers that *buntu installs through aptitude anyway these days and firefox is so simple it’s unreal. I used to get problems with the Debian sim-linking to Ice Weasel even after installing Firefox, but this time, it just worked immediately, I haven’t tried installing the NVidia drivers yet, since I haven’t actually installed it on a proper machine yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be just as easy as it is on *buntu.

When I’ve written my review, I’ll be sure to post it here, the trouble is, I may have to install it before I get round to writing the review, so it may take a few days.

Well I’m sure many of you will realise this, but those of you who are desperately searching for a way to do it and ended up here, I’ve noticed a few people have reported this bug and a few people who are new or newish to Linux trying to install Nvidia drivers and not getting very far with it, so the procedure following will allow you to install your NVidia drivers in a Virtual Terminal and then reboot to your GUI environment:

1) reboot your machine and hold down the SHIFT key as it boots up to get the GRUB menu to appear
2) Select the recovery option for the latest kernel and press enter to boot into recovery mode
3) From the recovery menu select “Drop to a Root Shell” (Doesn’t matter if you choose with networking or not)
4) Once you have a shell prompt type the following > telinit 3
5) You should now be in a root shell at RunLevel 3, allowing you to navigate to the folder that your driver is stored in

IF YOU’VE INSTALLED NVIDIA DRIVERS BEFORE THE REST IS SIMPLE, IF NOT READ ON

6) Once in the folder for your NVidia Driver type the following > sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-*
7) This should give you the basic Shell based Graphical Interface for the installer
The rest is obvious really from the information on screen, however here are a few tips:

Say NO to downloading a pre-compiled version from Nvidia, say yes to compiling one from source and say yes to running nvidia-config to enable the graphics drivers to be used in your xorg.conf file.

You should now have a running NVidia driver in your Karmic Koala installation, simply type > shutdown -r now
Your system will reboot and with any luck, if you’ve chosen the right driver, made the right choices in the installer etc you should see an NVidia splash screen momentarily before seeing the Karmic Login box.

Hope this helps anyone having trouble.