A bit of background info about Debian. Debian is a distribution of Linux which is well known for being incredibly stable. It is community developed rather than being developed by a company (Like Ubuntu, SUSE, or Red Hat for example). Debian has a stable release approximately once every 2 years. It is available for 12 different CPU architectures(!). There are 3 branches of Debian. Stable is... just that, stable. Testing is the development version of their next upcoming stable release. Unstable has no "release" and is always being updated with packages currently under development. Ubuntu is based on Debian Unstable.
Something that I find odd about the graphical installer is that it is nearly identical to the text installer. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just odd. But the graphical installer has something that I haven't seen in any other installer. A screenshot button.
I chose my language.
Based on my chosen language, I chose the appropriate country. I'm a Canadian, eh?
While it seem like the obvious choice is Canadian Multilingual, I (and most Canadians) have an American English keyboard.
I entered a hostname to identify the installed system on a network.
I'm not running a domain, so I left this blank.
I live in the Eastern Time Zone.
I normally like to set up the partitions (logical parts of a hard drive) manually, but this time I decided to set up the partitions automatically.
There are only 2 benefits that I know of for using more than one partition (aside from Swap). The first is that if one of the file systems get corrupted, the other file system(s) are safe. The second it that some file systems are better suited to different purposes involving the files they contain.
Looks good!
Once again, I confirm what will be formatted.
I set the password for the root/superuser/administrator account.
I entered in my "Full Name".
I chose my username. Your first name is chosen by default.
I set my user password.
This option allows you to use a network mirror to obtain packages not included on the CD/DVD, as well as download all updates during the installation.
Using a Canadian mirror sounds reasonable.
I've used the savoirfairelinux.net mirror before and have found it to be both speedy and reliable, so I went with that.
No proxy here.
Sure, why not join the package usage survey.
I chose the categories that I wanted to be installed.
I installed the GRUB bootloader since it's kind of difficult to boot to an operating system without a bootloader.
Done! Time to restart.
I timed the installation which took about 29 minutes. This may seem a bit long (for a linux distribution), but it downloaded and installed all available updates during the installation, which is nice.
Some strange things happened when I logged in.
1) I needed to log out to the login screen in order to shutdown or restart.
2) Optical media (maybe USB drives as well) wouldn't auto mount, so I needed to mount the Virtualbox Guest Additions using my somewhat limited knowledge of mounting.
3) Somewhat minor (expected) problem, but a bit annoying. The screenshots that I took during the installation were put in the /var/log/installer folder, but they required root permissions to view. I spent some time fiddling with the CLI permissions commands since the GUI didn't offer changing more than one file permission at a time.
I'm going to try installing Debian using the standard CD with GNOME instead of Xfce to see if I still get problem #1 and #2.
UPDATE: The last (and only) time that I tried Debian was about a year ago, with Debian 5.0 beta (1 or 2). I remember it being pretty good and it was very easy to use. It also included many of the same applications as Ubuntu, which is a good thing. But my installation of Debian 5 using the Xfce CD didn't leave me quite as impressed. Media wouldn't auto-mount, and for whatever reason, I needed to log out before shutting down or restarting the computer. The Xfce version also only had "Apt-get" and Aptitude installed as package managers by default. While apt-get actually is a command line utility, Aptitude just runs in the command line environment, but I find Aptitude awkward to use. I know how to use apt-get, so I ran "apt-get install synaptic" to install synaptic. That worked without a problem.
I downloaded and installed the standard disc-1 of Debian which uses the GNOME Desktop Environment. To speed up the installation, I chose not to configure a mirror. Bad idea. I'll talk about that in a bit.
First of all, problems 1 & 2 involving the needing to log out to shut down and the not auto-mounting no longer occurred. Sweet! I went to run Synaptic to install some packages in order to install the Virtualbox guest additions, but... no Synaptic. That's fine, I'll install Synaptic using apt-get. Nope, apt-get couldn't find Synaptic.
Long story short, while I could have added the necessary repository(/ies) from a little bit of Googling, I didn't feel like it since the installer is able to do that. If you want to install without using a mirror during the installation, at least have either more than 1 CD (3 is probably a good amount) or use the DVD disc-1.
I reinstalled using a mirror this time. It took quite a long time (I didn't time it). Once it finished installing, I booted up into the desktop. I looked through the menus and all the applications I remembered were in the menus. Add-Remove Applications, Synaptic Package Manager, Software Sources (provides easy configuration of the repositories) and maybe a few others. The environment is very similar to Ubuntu 8.04 .
If you want a simple to use desktop with high stability, Debian 5 GNOME is probably the way to go.
NOTE: I chose "Desktop Environment" and "Standard Installation" during the install. If you don't choose "Desktop Environment", you'll be brought to the command line after the installation is finished.
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