An article over at Linux.com on Debian 4 (Etch) got me interested to try it out. Since then, I’ve installed it a hand-full of times and have converted a few friends, too. I have read many articles by impressed bloggers about Debian Etch’s impressive features, and I have been impressed by my first hand impressions. But, what has most impressed me most so far is how Debian has handled my iMac G5.
I know 64bit PowerPC architecture is practically legacy but is that really any reason to not develop for it? Ubuntu’s Feisty release did not have support for ppc and honestly I haven’t been impressed by how it was running on my machine anyways.
The multi-architecture net-install iso is what i recommend: 1 disk to install debian on any system in my house and the mirrors are quite fast (as opposed to my experience with SUSE 10.2).
When you boot into the install cd be sure to type expert64 at boot prompt. I prefer the expert install even though I’m not an expert because of options and what I’ve learned simply from the installer.
If you decide to encrypt your disk, be prepared for the installation to take much longer as it has to thoroughly erase the disk and then encrypt it. During normal boot up of the system it will prompt you for the password you encrypted the disk which is not idea if you plan to run the machine headless.
I also decided to run the system with sudo instead of allowing root to log in (su). I did this for security and also because I’m used to it with Ubuntu. I did find that I had trouble in Gnome until I ran visudo and added my account to the list.
The two things I’m most happy with when comparing the Debian install with the Ubuntu install it replace is the speed of the computer and the display. Etch boots and runs noticeably faster than Dapper and correctly configured the screen resolution and all hardware for that matter right out of the box. This gave me great joy and pleesure.
Debian is rock solid and well supported even with PPC 64 architecture; I’d be surprised if they dropped support for the architecture so you won’t get stuck in the past when everyone else is dist-upgrading. Debian is feature rich, full of supported software, and you won’t be upgrading your kernel every week — for me that is a good thing as it shows a more thorough approach to Q/A.
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