The Dim-Witted IT Graduate

While waiting for some of the tools I need to install Slackware, (namely the Slackware Handbook), I decided to install Debian Etch (4.0r2).

Well the install was easy enough. I really don’t understand what’s so hard about the installation procedure that I have been hearing about. If I can do it, so can a 12 year old kid. The partitioning method was one of the most intuitive partitioning setup I ever encountered due to its simplicity. In fact I find the other GUI based partitioning methodology to be much more complicated.

But of course, after running Debian on my PC, I found the following issues to be not to my liking, or perhaps more appropriately, a cause of headache due to my inability to find a solution to them:

• I don’t know why but the mouse was so unresponsive. I have to press really hard just to select something. I don’t think this is due to the sluggishness of my PC as the apps run really well save for the hardship of clicking windows, icons, what have you’s. This is the first time I had this problem on a Linux distro. *
• As usual, Firefox (Iceweasel in this case) is slow and laggy compared to its Windows counterpart. Also, Flash movies stutter and experience momentary freeze from time to time specially when multiple Flash movies are being loaded on multiple tabs.
• Opera’s ability to play Flash movies is erratic. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just displays a gray box. The latter is more common unfortunately specially when trying to load multiple Flash streaming videos simultaneously. To be fair, this issue and the one before this is present on every other distro I have tried. So this could well be a bug in Linux in general and not solely of Debian.
• I tried intalling the ATI proprietary drivers using Envy but it doesn’t seem to work. I followed the instructions to the letter and even took note of the warnings on its FAQ. However, after all I did, Mesa still kept hijacking my OpenGL * >.<
• I wanted to try CompizFusion but the above prevented me so * T_T
• Why I am being disallowed to access my NTFS Windows drives when I am trying to access them via the Computer icon on the Desktop when I can access them by going through /media/hda1 and /media/hda5 with no problems? It is complaining that the drive is already mounted. If it is already mounted then, why can’t you just let me access it? I also tried unmounting and mounting it manually but this time, it complains that I have no permission to view its contents (But I still can access them if I wade through the file system). Also, I kept getting the outdated-kernel-error-hence-some-features-cannot-be-utilized-kind-of-thing message on boot and whenever I am mounting them manually. Maybe that’s it. So should I have to recompile the latest kernel for ntfs-3g to work? News Flash, I have no idea how to do that. And the guides I found on the Internet are hopelessly complicated and daunting to follow. Besides why can I access them via /media/hdax with read/write capabilities and not via the easily more accessible Computer icon in the first place? The mere fact that I have read/write access to them tells me that ntfs-3g works so long as I do not access them through the Computer icon and/or the icon automatically generated on the desktop when you mount media drives. I used automatix2 to install ntfs-3g by the way.

Aside from the above, I really like the distro. I am even considering making Debian Etch my primary Desktop OS due to its stability. It can be a pain to setup though and the mouse problem is a deal breaker for me. If I could find solutions to the above, Debian Etch would be staying on my PC for a long time. With that said, I would still be eagerly awaiting its next release and I am keeping my fingers crossed that the above would be solved already. In the meantime, distro hopping mode again for me. I heard though that SimplyMepis comes close into replicating the stability of Debian Etch, plus it has up-to-date features found in the most modern of Linux distro’s unlike Debian’s which is quite outdated by comparison. I found Ubuntu and Linux Mint to be quite lagging on the stability department hence I am still on the hunt. I hope SimplyMepis would be it. I wanted to stop distro hopping already. It so time consuming.

Slackware awaits… *shivers*

I suspect my mouse problem to be a hardware problem rather than an issue with Debian, so I’ll be buying a new mouse tomorrow to check.

I was able to to make the ATI proprietary drivers work by following this guide, though I am unsure to what extent since the guide seems tailored for 64 bit systems and I am only using a 32 bit system. I would try to make CompizFusion work in a while.