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Re: [LUG] how do install debian 6

 

On 19/01/12 16:25, paul sutton wrote:
> Why if you watch this video on One PC you can press space to pause,
> scroll back easily, so I find the videos easier to follow, if you look
> at the official install guide from debian its slightly more than a few
> pages of HTML http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ Give me that
> simple, jargon / techno babble free video any day, sorry, Paul 

I'm not disagreeing with you for one second here regarding the video,
but I really feel sorry for anyone who needs instructions on how to do a
basic Debian install... it's easier than a vanilla Windows install,
particularly taking into account the post-install work required to get
the machine up to date and basically tuned, with useful applications
installed (centralised apt-get/synaptic vs randomly downloading
installers from web pages: Ninite sucks). Also, anyone who finds the
excellent Debian documentation confusing really, really shouldn't be
doing any admin level work on any PC, ever (again, not pointing the
finger at you Paul!).

Currently I'm talking a non-technical but intelligent friend through
wiping win7 starter edition from his new netbook and setting up dual
boot win7 ultimate/mint linux: from a non-technical user's standpoint,
let me tell you, it's windows that is confusing. Of course, us
professionals have no excuse for not having netboot servers and
automated infrastructure management tools (puppet, WSUS, etc) for all
this stuff - which brings me back to my other point regarding the
Raspberry Pi boards. I believe Arch will also be available but as Paul's
other email said, surely we'll all be netbooting our Raspberries over
ethernet? Who the hell wants to muck around with SD cards or USB boot?
I'd like to think that any of us technical types getting Rasberries
should at least have the skills to set up such toolchains, let alone
need instructions on how to install Debian on them.

And to respond to Gordon, yeah, the bootloader is cooked into the SoC
firmware blob unfortunately (see the Raspberry Pi mailing lists for
linux guru Alan Cox not being exactly thrilled about this) but it won't
have much effect on end users as your imagined scenario of booting the
ARM netinst image and going from there is exactly what I plan to be
doing when mine arrives. Trying to persuade one of my clients that he
really needs to buy me a whole box of them at the moment for 'testing'
purposes, haha.

Cheers,

Mat

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