I'm Ready to Scream

My Mandrake setup was getting somewhat long in the tooth so I bit the bullet last night and downloaded the minimal net installer for Debian. People keep insisting to me that, although the initial installers for Debian are the biggest pile of shit you will ever see, it is well worth the effort as Debian is by far superior to every other conceivable setup.

Bollocks.

It's taken god-only-knows how many re-installs to get Debian to accept the fact that I don't want to re-partition my harddrive. It chokes on the most minor of things. On many occasions I had to get myself a console and do stuff manually as the installer was too shit to handle it. Still I carried on, determined to reap the rewards of this far superior distribution. By the time I had finally got a working minimal install with 'net access etc etc I was starting to lose hope. Still I stuck to my guns and downloaded all the packages after trawling through the stupidly long package-selection list. And when I finally got to the other side and had set everything up I knew I was just one reboot away from my shiny new Debian system.

Except I wasn't. X failed to start claiming I didn't have sufficient memory to run a 640x480 8 bpp display. Of course I don't. My graphics card only has 64 Mb of RAM on it, there's no way that the required 300 Kb could fit in that. Still, that was just a minor inconvenience. Much hacking of the XFree86-config-4 file later and I had a booting X-server. But what's this? gdm, kdm and xdm are all installed and not one of them is working properly. Never mind. KDE is loading anyway, so at least I'll have a desktop. Except, oh, KDE has crashed without so much as an error message. On closer inspection I find that the installer has ignored my requests to use my existing partitions and so everything has been installed onto hdb1 - the partition I have set aside for the root filesystem. Great. Time to reinstall yet-a-fucking-gain.

This time I work out how to get the installer to install the system without crashing at the sight of my existing partitions. It installs. Hurrah. I carefully select all my packages again and it starts downloading. This time things seem to be going fairly smoothly. Only one package chokes on install and that wasn't anything major. Again the X server is dead. Again I hack the XF86-Config-4 file. The X server stays dead. Much hacking later I find that the installer had chosen to use the Framebuffer Device and that was choking the nv driver. Of course it didn't tell me this. That would be too easy, of course. More hacking and eventually I have a working X server. kdm isn't loading. Much faffing and it starts loading. Good.

When I get into X I find that half the stuff I use is missing. Fluxbox, xmms, aterm... I download it all. Mozilla isn't working. I upgrade it. Eventually I find some settings had persisted from my previous install which were confusing it. I fix the settings, up it pops. It looks ugly. I go to the settings only to find the setting I want has vanished. I check the version: 1.0. 1.0?! That's their "latest" version? How far behind the times do Debian want to be?!

My soundcard's drivers haven't been loaded. I'm going to have to try and remember exactly what the soundcard is now seeing as Debian can't autodetect it (like every other OS and distribution of Linux ever) and fix that manually. I suspect the "latest" version of Fluxbox from the Debian sources is ancient as it doesn't seem to do half the stuff it should, such as shortcut keys etc, and the mouse is configured as the most basic mouse ever. All in all it's one big mess.

But you know what? I haven't the energy to perform another install. I shall fix this version how I like my system and then it can stay like that.

Now to sort this fucking mouse out.