My first Lenny install, and first successful install from my new USB key fob, on to "cube".

Debian earns its reputation as hard to install sometimes.

Remember Lenny is the current testing, it still has known nasty bugs.

I got boot.img.gz from www.debian.org, and took eternity figuring out that my USB pen drive had been delivered with four(!?) partitions. So repartitioning the pen drive (1 2GB partition is fine) and updating the master boot record got me a bootable pen drive.

Then I noticed:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2008/20080508

So to try Lenny I needed....

boot.img.gz

netinst.iso

Something like....

zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/[penddrivedevicenamehere]
cp netinst.iso /mnt/auto/[pendrivedevicenamehere]
install-mbr /dev/[pendrivedevicenamehere]
sync
shutdown -r now

The "/mnt/auto" is because I was using a Knoppix CD to create my USB key fob. So I eject the CD pronto on reboot, and set the BIOS to boot from "USB-HDD".

It boots - looks pretty and offers me some choices including "Installer" and "Graphical Installer". I picked "Installer" and hit the second hurdle (figuring out what I need on the USB stick and getting it on being hurdle number one). This is an old one, the install screen messes up because of VGA mode. I suspect I could reboot with vga=791 as a kernel option, but Debian seems to be the only distro not forcing something here - I'm sure there is a reason - I hope it is a good reason.

Anyway I chose the "Graphical Installer" on reboot, because I'm persistent, and I wanted to see it. The Graphical Installer "just worked" (Excellent!), selected "Desktop" (only) and left it to get on with it.

Actually I kind of waited, and waited and waited and then gave up and went to bed. Goodness it was a slow process. Now partly I think that ftp.uk.debian.org was probably a bit busy, but the "cube" isn't a beefy little box (512MB of RAM and a VIA Samuel 2 processor) and it seems to spend a lot of time running gconftool-2 and scrollkeeper which seem fairly CPU hungry. Whatever the cause the install seemed slower than expected, although disk I/O isn't stunning either (the "cube" has a laptop disk drive, one that is a lot quieter than the previous one that died).

Now hurdle three I'm still examining, but when the install finished GNOME was in a bad way (no panel - note that X "just worked!). I suspect that the failure to download the libedataserverui1.2-8 package is at the root of it (Due I think to a glitch in talking to ftp.uk.debian.org at that point in the download). "apt" was all keen to remove half of GNOME, and so I thought I'd run "tasksel" and install "Desktop" again. "tasksel" then removed the packages "apt" had been eyeing. "apt-get install gnome" got everything back, but "gnome-panel" failed to configure so stopped various dependencies from configuring. "apt-get install gnome-panel" then caused everything to fall into place.

What do I think of Lenny - heck I've hardly used it yet. The GNOME menus are tidy, but in truth one default GNOME desktop looks much like another. The selection of available software is of course unbelievably massive, and I've already used 3.6GB just getting "Desktop" installed. But having been using "Sid" at home and Etch (with KDE) at work, Lenny looks good.

Etch was difficult to install on the same hardware, Lenny went in without any need to know anything about the hardware. So the installer folk (and X, and kernel) folk have clearly been working hard to make it simpler.

Guess I better go file a proper installation report.