I've been hapilly running Debian etch for over a year now. It's been the most rock solid stable distro I've run yet. It's been the most satisfying since I ran Mandrake 10.0. (I know they aren't the same I'm just saying I haven't been as pleased with a system since then). Well I finally broke down and got cable internet a couple months back. I've been playing with some things but decided to give a jump at trying some new systems. Now I tried Mandriva 2008 earlier in the year from cd's I burned at work. Not really impressed. It used to be my best but it's become too bloated. And I've read some good things and some not so good about Kubuntu. Here's my dish.

First I am NOT a fan of NOT having a root login. I prefer having su instead of sudo. For some reason it seemed to mess things up for me in kubuntu. too numerous to mention. I spent all yesterday futzing with it. I first installed Hearty. The first thing I noticed was that all my drives were listed as scsi drives with /dev/scd.. addresses. Not /dev/hdx?. Perplexing but not a show stopper. Second I have an older (old by today's standards) box. I built myself and it works great and don't have aneed to upgrade right now. 1.3 amd athlon 825mb ram with a Radeon 9200. I have an older Dell monitor. It would NEVER give me the correct resolution. I could force it in my user but couldn't get it to stick for the system. it would revert to 1280X1024 (or something like that) when I use 1024x860. No matter what I did I could not get the resoltion to stick. Even using the xorg config file I saved from my etch install. And fighting with the grub loader was a pain. (I prefer lilo but that's just me). Now I was pleased to see the amount of packages that were installed. But dismayed to see some of the basics weren't given menu entries (I'd have to do that myself if I wanted to use them from the menu). I was glad to see Firefox and Thunderbird available and loaded fine and since I saved my /home dir I could just jump right into my internet. But that's as far as I got. So this morning I decided to give Gutsy a try. Didn't even get through the partitioner. I wanted to use all my existing partitions. But when I set them all up the installer would not offer me the option to format my / and /usr drives. And when I attempted to go on anyhow it complained that the drives HAD to be formatted and kicked me back to the partitioner. Now I'm not sure if deleting the drives and remaking them would work but with my /home still there I didn't want to run the chance of having that drive corrupted. Now Heron set them all up fine. But Gutsy...well I got this far and gave up.

SOOOO. I instead pulled out the Install cd 1 of Debian Lenny. Popped it in. I'm very familiar with all Debian's setup quirks so seeing a full graphical install finally was nice. everything setup just as planned. But I did it differently this time. See previously I had only a lowly dial-up internet and installing over the dialup was more than painful before. But now with the cable I could give it a go. Also I was able to do something I've been wanting to do. See I purchased all 21 cd's for etch last time. And it's a bear loading them all and THEN picking what I want to load. And I have to do it for the big box, my old laptop and the kids machine. So this time I used CD1, setup the internet and then downloaded what I wanted. Of course in the first round I downloaded apt-move and used that to create mirrors on my system that I later used to create my own custom install cd's. Now I looked online and GAWD! Lenny is now up to 28 cds??!! Even that's getting too much for me. So with my latest strategy I cut that down. I can now install my entire system from 3...count them 3 little cd's. And even CD 3 wasn't full. Now I've got the system loaded and a new sparkle. Man this sucker runs FAST!!! Beats Etch even. So now I'm digging in and getting everything tweaked. I'm gonna give it a good burn in this week and if all goes well I'm gonna load it in the laptop next weekend. Only disappointment (and this isn't a debian thing necessarily) is that my favorite streaming audio player xmms is dead. No longer with us. I've read a bit online on it's drop and am seriously disappointed. But figured how to get mplayer to do the same. So all's good. And now I can take all the extra sleeves in my cd binder out since I don't need 21 or 28 cd's to load my system. Just 3. And this is still Beta. Gotta say, I'm impressed. And pleased again. Once more keeping me tied to Debian's ship. Since it was my first distro I tried in 98 by installing from floppies!

Next time use the netinstall cd ... 150 MB ... If you have a good internet connection, it's all you need.

Well I did it that way for a reason. As I was writing, I have two more computers and I'd like to be able to install the same system on them too. Especially since Lenny runs so good. And I don't want to have to worry about plugging both into the internet as I have to reset the connection. Also I might use them to convert others. And having an actual cd for those with less than fast connections is helpful. Otherwise I wouldn't have worried about burning the new system to cd's.

Cheers on moving away from *buntu. Sorry, I didn't read your entire post as it is a bit long.
This: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PainlessUpgrade made me run away screaming a few days ago when my interest became peaked for all of about 10 minutes. A complete reinstall? Please. I whole heartedly suggest either Debian or Slackware to any and everyone.

Didn't really move AWAY from ubuntu. I have been running Etch happily. I was attempting to try Kubuntu. But got your point. There is one little kink that really sticks in me. Last night I was finishing my personal tweaks in Lenny. Well I like Mplayer for most of my multimedia uses. Except maybe Juk. Well I have no use for noatun. I usually don't even install it. But it installed by itself with lenny. So I went to apt-get remove noatun. Sheeesh. They system wanted to totally wipe out my kde. Seems the dependencies lock it in as necessary. KDE requires kdeaddons and kdeaddons require noatun. What a bite. So I'm removing all instances of it from my associations. Would have been easier to just remove it. GRRRR!

Other than that. Lenny is running like a dream. And as far as Kubuntu having up-to-date packages. I see that most of the stuff that Kubuntu had is in Lenny. Even gnutella is good to go. Just wish the Firefox issue wasn't there. But no big....

That's part of the auto-remove function of the newer versions of apt-get trying (unsuccessfully, IMO) to keep up with aptitude.

Once you figure it out, it's very useful, but a bit of a pain when you're not expecting it. At least, it's good you look at what's being removed. Lots of people just hit "Y" and then bemoan the fact that the package manager assume they knew what they were doing.

Understanding meta-packages is the key to dealing with auto-remove. Your problem with noatun could probably have been avoided by installing "kde-core" instead of "kde". There are ways to disable it altogether as well (man apt.conf), but it's better to learn to make it work for you rather than against you.

Switching from apt-get to aptitude is also good. (First command ... # aptitude keep-all)

That'd be nice....in theory. Couple problems. First, I did also try in Aptitude. I first did apt-get and cancelled it. Then I brought up aptitude. Not as bad but it downgraded a couple packages. Not important so didn't worry about it. But if I had gone through the whole run even Aptitude would have deleted all of KDE. Also I installed with the Lenny KDe install cd. It just installed KDE as-is. I didn't get to choose until after. And now it's installed i can't get noatun out. And adding KDe core won't change the fact that kdeaddons requires noatun. And I need the addons for some other items. So stuck there too.

I can deal with it for now though. But yeah, I am one of the few that actually DOES read the prompts (after once 2 years ago blowing away my /home dir during a test install.

Go ahead and let it blow away kde, then install kde-core.

Nah, last time I did that it took a while to sort it back out. It's loaded and itworks. Don't wanna mess with it. Besides. Need it to work on now. I'll try installing KDEcore and try removing later though.

Good decision use Debian instead of Kubuntu.

It is true that Ubuntu has often packages which did not make it yet to the Stable or even Testing version of Debian. (And that tells something about the matureness of Ubuntu as well). But the number of available packages in Debian is larger than in Ubuntu anyway. Once I installed Ubuntu, and could not find 2 out of 3 utility programs that I considered essential.

As for your package manager, it should be possible to run aptitude and apt concurrently bacause they are just different front ends to the dpkg system. But it is generally considered better to stick with one of them. I prefer apt myself.

jlinkels

Doesn't matter which you use. I use both. It's not really an issue. But I'm just leaving the system as is. By the way kde-core was installed when I tried to remove noatun.

Actually The developers recommend you use either apt or aptitude and don't switch back and forth.

Since etch was released the developers recommend you aptitude instead of apt..

See the etch release notes for confirmation.

Hmmp. What is the reasoning behind that? Aptitude is only a front end for apt anyhow. I haven't had any problems. I do a little bit of a mix. Mostly through aptitude. Some through apt and even a few special pacakges I have saved separate loaded through dpkg itself. Hey if it works.....

BTW, sudo su is a valid command on *buntu.
put in your password and you're superuser. Do a quick passwd. Choose a pasword and voila! You have su! I do it every time I install any *buntu, as I thin that its safer this way (since I've password protected the root account).

Cheers.

When I used to play with ubuntu, the very first thing I did was:
sudo passwd root