"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Sunday 20 February 2011

Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" on EEEPC 900

The new Linux Debian, 6.0 “Squeeze”, version has been recently released. Less than a day after the official release date the live version has been also made available. I decided to try it on my EEEPC 900 not to evaluate a possible definitive installation but because Debian is the base on which are built Ubuntu and many important distributions so it is interesting to see how the “pure” Debian behave and perform on my system.

Download and installation

I downloaded the disk image from Debian download page, many download options are possible, among the others the one I prefer, Bittorrent, is available . I then tried first to prepare the bootable SD card, as usual, with the boot disk preparation utility provided with Ubuntu but, for same reason, the tool didn't work with the downloaded Debian disk image. I so went for the command line way and, following Debian's site instructions, I copied the image to the SD card with the following commands.
sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdc
cat debian-live-6.0.0-i386-gnome-desktop.img > /dev/sdc
after a while I have been able to boot from the SD card to Debian (unfortunately this method made my SD card look like it was only 1GB).

First impressions

If you're looking for fancy and shining graphics then you shouldn't looking at Debian. The system boots in a little more than a minute, quite good for the EEEPC SD card, and here is how it looks like.
Screenshot-Debian-6.0
I verified that all EEEPC hardware works, all but the wireless network unfortunately. Anyway there seem to be on the Internet some solution here and there. I didn't test them since I'm not going to definitively install Debian on my EEEPC.

Conclusions

There is not much more to say about … that's Debian most of innovation is not visible to most of us. All you have, under your eyes, once you installed it's a clean, honest and robust Linux system. After all isn't that what we should expect from an operating system?

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