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Saturday, March 31, 2007

Running Away From Debian

I had one week, four days Debian experience and I must say it was interesting and a pain.

I got bored with Ubuntu because it wasn't fun anymore nothing really breaks for me to fix, so I decided to switch to a different distribution, Gentoo and Debian came into mind but I chose Debian because it was easy for me to get ( a friend had already started downloading it ) than Gentoo that I have to start afresh.

After installation of Debian, the fun started, my wireless card wasn't detected, sound card nope :-( , ugly looking font, boring theme then I had the feel, I had really switched to a different distro.

I began to solve the issues one after the other, I started with the sound issue, few googling got me the way now sound card was detected but still I can't play any audio files but I can hear the system sounds so I felt I'm some how through.
I went on again to hunt for solution for my inability to play audio files, then one of my google hits hinted me about user groups, then it clicked me to check if my account belongs to the sound group. Upon checking I realized my account doesn't belong to that group, so I added my account to the group and boom, I solved the sound issue.

The next issue was the boring theme, I went to gnome-looks to get some few themes, I got one that I was happy with.Tango-green and Tango icons, now my system was appealing to the eyes.

The next issue( ugly looking font ) made me say bye bye to Debian because it was rendering me unproductive . The time I have to work, I will be fixing problems. The font issue really screwed up everything, it made me loose GDM. The more I try to solve it the more the problem increases, so I decided to switch back to my old friend because I was really unproductive and I had loads of work on me.

I must say I had fun but I wasn't patience enough I would have stayed with it. Debian is great, it has huge repository of packages. Voluminous of documentations.
I will visit it again after I have off load most of my heavy work. Now I'm back on boring Ubuntu.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have used Debian for several years and I have never had the problem you had with sound. Users have always been part of the sound group automatically. Sound has always worked out of the box.

Which version of Debian did you install? If you installed Sarge, then itä's really unfair to compare it with ubuntu. You should try Etch which is current Debian testing and which will be released as stable soon.

Etch has much better support for the wireless cards etc than Sarge.

Ugly looking fonts can be fixed by setting GNOME fonts settings properly. If you use TFT-monitor play with subpixel settings. You can use fonts-preferences which you can find from GNOME menu.

Anonymous said...

Just turn on anti-aliasing? I'm not sure if it's enabled by default.

Henry Addo said...

I installed debian testing which is Etch, but I don't know what happened sound didn't just work, I had to manually make it work.

Anonymous said...

Your post is pretty unfair and with an absurd title.

What kind of PC? wich version? which repositories? did you do full update?

Henry Addo said...

I'm not trying to be unfair or discriminate but just trying to post how I became unproductive that is all. Debian is great and I love it. After all Ubuntu is based on Debian.

My PC is Toshiba Satellite M55S139 notebook computer, I installed Debian Testing, for the repository it was the testing repositories.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
you should have come to the debian-user mailing list. We are friendly folks who could have helped you with these issues. Ubuntu has everything integrated, more or less, for desktop user and include some restricted kernel modules which are non-free by debian. Debian also doesnt have all the auto-detection. But with debian-user and maybe looking on wiki.debian.org, we would have given you the advice needed.
Cheers,
Kev