Since my oldest PC (a 120 MHz pentium with a 800 MB hard-disk), I always had a Linux partition on it. Most of time, it was or for fun, or for developpement. In the last two years, I had the opportunity to work full time on a RedHat 8.0 station, which I used to upgrade with apt-get. And my job changed 3 monthes ago. As soon as I had my new PC, I wondered : which Linux distribution could I install on this thing ? As I knew quite well RedHat and Mandrake, and heard so much about about Debian every were, but had no luck with previous installs, I decided to try the new sarge installer. Downloaded the netinstall cd, and tried to boot. Las. The CD did not even boot. I had no floppy disk. Stuck...

But I decided to drop a bug report to debian. And three monthes later, an email. Try this new installer. It just worked. I could not get the new graphical installer, but got a nice ncurses installer, which is cool too. I installed the minimum, got the network workimg flawlessly after 2 tries and playing a bit with the network cable (ok, the installer is still beta).

Then I played a bit with apt-get. It is so easy to bring an empty box to something you can actually use. Got X and configured it (i had to try several times before undersstanding the output of pciprobe). Then KDE. And woaw ! I used to work with KDE 3.1, and the difference is amazing. KDE 3.2 is so fast, so professional, so beautifull in its plastik dress... Woaw. Konkeror really shines. Everything is so snappy !

Then got openoffice and bistream fonts. This acheives everything.

Nice desktop

Now, linux is ready for the desktop.