On Saturday 11 September 2004 23:36, Anil Kulkarni wrote:

hello every1, i have been a newbee in linux & also on this grp, i c lot of events and meetings being organised, but from a newbeis point of view i would like to suggest u ppl to keep an seminar or a small workshop abt GNU/Linux....especially abt switching onto "Debian" from other linux distribution

Debian is as easy to install as any other. But ofcourse it works best if you understand a few things about your hardware and your software needs. The simplest method is to read the installation howto at http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install

Quite comprehensive. Ask questions after u have read that. Debian can be installed on at least 11 archs and in umpteen permutations (from a 1.44mb floppy to a large cluster of load balancing fault tolerant server farm). If a desktop is all u require go with knoppix, which is based on debian and requires u to type "hdinstall" at the bash command prompt. And best of all Debian is built based on policies decided by the user and developer community - no arbitary shifts and funny patches to make u their slave for life.

i mean the installation GUI of other distributions like RH & Mandrake r very user friendly, but thats not the case with debian, and especially for a newbee its very difficult.

Yeah as long as u want sombody else to do the hardwork.

There are lot of guys out there want to learn debian, unfortunately today in all classes they teach RH, its like "Linux = RH", moreover there r very few books or almost 'none' available in book stalls regarding debian, and its not possible for all ppl to just log onto net and read ebooks.

Dont think of using Debian without having a good net connection. Infact a desktop computer is nothing more than a glorified electronic typewriter without the internet.

So i strongly feel that there shd be some event organised abt starting/learning debian.....and other such isuues which could be difficult for a newbee to configure on debian..I know that "Knoppix" could be a nice solution for this but still lets try to learn the typical debian way....

The typical way with GNU/Linux is self help. So go to that url and read.