My experience installing the Debian distro

[SirClintonPortis]

I have always been interested by Linux since a while back, trying portable liveCDs just to get a taste of the system. Of course, those things were rather nerfed and sometimes led to crashes. The prospect of not using the hard drive at all with those minimalist live cd distros is rather interesting, but whatever.
Now, my mom was practically coerced nicely into buying a new netbook by a friend, and thus I found an opportunity to try out an installation.

I had to first perform some upkeep in the Windows 7 Starter. First, I had to shrink the partition file. Yes, Windows' Disk Management has a native support for that. But, I could not shrink more than half of the space available in the hard drive. The reason behind this was because of the System Volume Information, where the System Restore files are, were in a freaking sec. After much time consumed trying to find a free solution that would move those files, I came across the program JKDefrag. It defragmented the system and then optimized it by moving the System Volume Information folders to a more appropriate place. It allowed me to shrink the Windows 7 partition down to around 25-30 GBs.

The way I chose to install Debian was by win32-loader. It is a file you run in Windows, and then you restart the system.

Installation via wireless did not work as it wasn't detected. It doesn't like Realtek rtl8188ce card. Much time was burned until I finally just used an ethernet cable and thus was able to proceed. After the installer downloaded a few files, I got to the partition screen. After some messing around, I decide the root folder (denoted by "/" would be on a partition of 5 GBs and have the ext3 filesystem. The swap partition would have 768 MB, and the /home partition had 5 GBs and the ext4 filesystem. The rest of the install wasn't painful, although with my DSL connection, I had time to go out and mow the grass while it downloaded some files. I had to set the root password and user information after that. Afterwards, I decided to install GRUB because the "/" parition was a logical partition, and I wasn't taking ANY chances.

Debian started up nicely, but the wireless was still a problem. After much anguish trying out various solutions, I eventually found out that Realtek offers a Linux driver for their wireless card. After some Google searches, I found how to install these tarballs. In the root terminal, use "cd" in the command line to go to the directory where the tarball files were extracted, and then type in "make install" to do the two tasks necessary to install the file. FINALLY, wireless works.

GNOME is the desktop environment I'm currently using.

Now, onto the more fun stuff. GNOME also has a system monitor. What's immediately noticeable is that NONE of the swap(which is similar to the page file in Windows), is being used yet. So it seems, that Debian keep everything in the much faster RAM than Windows.

It also tells me that the "/" directory is 77% full. I guess I could have made it a little bigger. The /home directory, on the other is almost empty.

GNOME comes with the Epiphany browser. I'm using IceWeasel though, which is a rebranded Firefox for Debian.

So, so far, I learned that:
1. Microsoft makes partitioning needlessly painful
2. installing Debian over WiFi can be hit or miss due to hardware issues
3. Debian is FAR less of a resource hog that Windows 7 starter and it's "smarter".
4. I could have have made my "/" partition a little bigger.