End of an Experiment—Debian Done
End of an Experiment
Well, after I
installed Debian 6.0.6 on my G5 Power Tower ....
Yeah.
It had all sorts of problems, let me tell you. And while many of the problems were probably user errors, the PPC POWER4 architecture just didn't find any friends. The software updater absolutely failed. The system couldn't access certain directories on my external drive, and since those were the media files, well, yeah.
In the end, I was left looking at three quarters of a terabyte of disk space I had managed to make either inaccessible (external) or useless (internal).
I need that space. Was a time when I would have laughed at the idea of 150 gigs not being enough, but at present I have thirteen gigs available, and that's after destroying some media files that had been sitting around, unused, long enough, and weren't so valuable to me that I archived them to DVDr.
I don't know, maybe the WD 250GB drive would have worked fine with Ubuntu, but since it was originally used for OSX, I had hooked it up via FireWire. And, now, well, you guessed it, I have no idea where my USB cable is. And since it's a proprietary split cable, I don't have any random substitutes sitting around.
I'm not going to badmouth Debian. It was just a bad match for this particular computer and my particular (lack of) technical skills.
On the other hand, once I figured out why my OSX installer wasn't working (10.2, disc 2 ...
duh!), and located my 10.4 installer, the hardest part of the install was deciding how to partition the master drive, and what to name the things. For that, at least, I can deal with Apple, despite the fact that my operating system is essentially obsolete.
And, on the upside, no more Unicode for my bullets and long dashes.
No, really, I can't tell you how important those are.
Oh, yeah. And I get my Safari RSS reader back. Haven't found anything to compare with that on Linux.
.... And the installation is finished. Now it's just time to play around with settings and profiles.
As far as the
Ubuntu experience is concerned, I have no complaints. Debian just wasn't the right tool for this particular job.