So I have a 90MHz Pentium1 subnotebook – Toshiba Portege 610CT – which I have fitted a 4Gb HD into and which has a cracking 40Mb of physical memory.

I want to put Linux on it, so I have a motorbike-friendly laptop.

I have had Linux running on this beast before and sought to put RedHat9 on it last night, only to be defeated by the RedHat installer’s stupidities, in that it boots the network subsystem before the PCMCIA / CardBus subsystem, and that it does not seem possible to get the installation working because of this; very much a matter of putting the cart before the horse, when you are trying to do a network install of a laptop.

I cast around on Google for some considerable time, until I ran into this page – [www.hollenback.net] – where some person with exactly the same laptop tals about how easy it is to install Debian.

Hmmm…

Since 1994 I have used several Linux Distributions – SLS, Slackware, Redhat 3 through 9, a brief and disasterous flirtation with Mandrake – but I have not yet used Debian other than to have encountered and grown to hate its packaging mechanism on MacOS X via Fink.

I have to admit that my experience was prettymuch as the guy described – download 6 floppy-disk images, write them to disk, and boot off them following the instructions to complete the install over ADSL.

It did, indeed work.

It did also, however, confirm my suspicions about Debian as being a distribution assembled by geeks to be user friendly and easy to install in the way that geeks understand it.

Buttons that say YES or NO with questions like: Do you want your man command to run SetUID?

or: here’s a nice package selection interface that is based on what roles you might want to use the machine to perform, but why is Emacs part of the “Unix Server” package?

or: dselect – 40+ screenfulls of packages (on a tiny keyboard) that with a single keystroke you can add, delete or otherwise screw-up your system, followed by inteminable questions (“How would you like to configure your ISDN adapter?”) …

Eventually I wiped the install and started again from scratch, am installing a minimal system with no extra packages, and will run dselect over SSH at some later date to populate it with software.