My story with Linux, Part 1

My story with Debian GNU\Linux is a true love story. At least for the time being. This post is dedicated to describe how I got "here". "Here" is my relationship with Debian on my laptop started, and this post will also describe what I can or can't do with my Debian GNU\Linux and will be like a long going bug report, hopefully this will help someone resolve those bugs with time. I've started using Linux about 3.5 years ago. My first installation was Mandriva 2005 LE. I loved it, I enjoyed the beautiful KDE 3.5 desktop they had. But this was on an old desktop I had. I wanted it on my laptop, HP compaq nx6110. After a few days of struggling with setting up wifi, I decided to install Fedora 3.

This was fun also. I love their gnome desktop and slick font design and overall desktop design. But again I had problems with wifi on this laptop... So I moved to OpenSUSE which was released then. MAN! that was it ! I stuck on SUSE, everything worked. I loved the desktop, I love how easily I could install software, that was it. Me and the chameleon were best friend, until I wanted to upgrade to OpenSUSE 10.1...

The decision to upgrade was a disaster, even though the upgrade went smoothly. But the desktop started crashing endlessly and installing software became a nightmare. I fought with it. I loved but hated it. So I became confident enough to try Ubuntu 6.06 along side with OpenSUSE 10.1.

Ubuntu was a great success from first moment. All my hardware worked except I couldn't put my computer on Sleep mode. But I could live with it. So I continued playing and working on both distributions. For about 4 months. Until I did something stupid... I wanted to expand Ubuntu's partition and cut a little bit from OpenSUSE. This was a disaster because I erased my partition table and lost all my data. Recovery was only partial, but I decided to install only Ubuntu and Windows this time.

So I lived happily with Ubuntu for almost two years. I upgraded from 6.06 to Ubuntu 6.10 and the to 7.04. Things changed from version to version, mostly for good. Some changes needed a small learning curve. But in general Ubuntu taught me how to handle command line and man pages as well as reporting bugs through launchpad and even translating some strings to Hebrew and also participate in the Translation of Exaile media player.

But then came the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 which was a nightmare. I could not mount external usb keys thanks to a bug the guys in Ubuntu continuously ignored. So I did a clean install, but this was also trouble. The installation program adopted the partition editor from the Fedora installation was is completely unusable comparing to the partition editor built in the installation program of Debian, which was formerly used in Ubuntu. So I carefully managed no to harm my hard drive, and when installation finished I found a crappy full of Junk Ubuntu installed on my Laptop. This was when I decided to try Debian Etch that was released on that time. This led to a love story, which will be told next...