Posts by John

'Lenny': Debian for the masses?

Some Clarifications

First off, there aren't different "versions" of Debian. Debian itself contains Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, and the like. You don't have to install something like Kubuntu to get KDE, Eeebuntu to get the Eee version. Debian main scales from everything from a N810 to a massive server.

Secondly, there is no "CLI installer". I don't know what the reviewer was referring to there. The text-mode is the same installer as the graphical one, just presented... as text. Not command line. There is cdebootstrap, which lets you bootstrap a new Debian installation from within a running one, and that is a fully-automated command-line tool, but I don't think that's what they were thinking of.

If you want to manually select which desktop environment you use -- or none at all -- you can just not select the desktop environment task and install the kde, gnome, or whatever packages you like yourself. It is not hard, and they are not mutually exclusive, either. You can have both Gnome AND KDE on your system at once. They will integrate into each other's menu systems even.

Network install speed

I guess I should also add this: the comments about the netinst images are a bit misleading.

The network install should never be slower than downloading a massive ISO and using that. In fact, it should almost always be faster, because you download only what you really need. It would only be slower if you're going to be installing a whole bunch of machines -- in which case you could opt for the DVD, or a caching proxy, or a mirror.