Debian and HP dl360

I got my self a brand new HP DL360, 1 G RAM and 2 CPUs. And I thought it's about time I get to know Debian. It was not love at first sight...

I started with Linux in 1995. It was slackware back then. Got it off a mirror here. It fits on how many disks, i forgot. Man.. how time flies.

It was RedHat after a while, that I got off a magazine (forgot which). It was v4. And i have been with RedHat since.

Until RedHat changed their Business Plans. Currently, I have zope running on Redhat 7.x and 9. And I'm running Fedora Core 1 on my development box.

And one of my many New Year's resolution was to use Debian for all my future server installs. Wy not Gentoo? or Mandrake, or SuSe? I don't know. Maybe Debian is by geeks for geeks? maybe it's apt-get?

Anyway, I've had good experience with other Debian based distros like Gibraltar and Knoppix.

So, there I was, getting ready to install. I had hoped that it'd be something like RedHat install. Boy, was I in for a surprise. It's anything but ..

• the install has too many options/forks. it's okay for someone who has some experience installing linux. I wouldn't know if it fits newbies who want to try linux.
• the Broadcom 10/100/1000 NIC was not detected during the install. So I cannot just use CD #1. I have to burn all CDs. I cannot use many of the Net-Boot CD i found after googling. And, I cannot compile the bcmxxx NIC using the source from apt. I have to get the driver from broadcom, and compile that.

So, it was not a great first date. But I think it is a start for a lasting relationship. I have to learn more as I use Debian. And apt-get really is as good as I thought it was (was using apt-get for rpm with rh7,9 and fedora).

It took me one day, instead of one hour to install .. :P

We'll see...