Good Bye Fedora, Hello Debian.

Having given up on Fedora it was time to decide what my new operating system will be. Initially I settled upon OpenSuse. All linux distributions are essentially the same except for the installer and the system administration apps. But if you are a command line freak that isn't really going to matter two much. However you will need to be wary of the fact that the structure of the /etc folder differs from distro to distro.

Having decided on Suse, I tried to download and install it by using the 'network installation method'. It allows you to start the installation by downloading just the core components. Packages are downloaded only if you really need them. Thus the initial download is only 71MB, but it seemed like it would take forever to complete with the mirror I was directed to being very slow.

Then I discovered that Debian had the same installation method (which is called the Tiny CD). That downloaded really quickly and I was armed with a boot CD in minutes.

The installation turned out to be painless. No messing about with X server configurations. In the old days most newbies were turned off linux all together because it was well nigh impossible to configure X. Things have changed.