Okay, I've had it - I am fed up. Debian Linux is crap - pure, unadulterated crap. Furhermore, it is crap like Debian that is giving Linux such a bad name. Nothing works on this distro. Nothing. These are not hardware problems, since most of the stuff work under e.g. WINDOWS or fraking SUSE Linux 9.1 - NINE POINT ONE, fer godx sake - that's what, 4 years old now, 5? SuSE 9.1 still uses the 2.4.x kernel, fer fux sake. Yet SuSE 9.1 has some functionality - it "just works".
Since installing this Debiian crap, nothing on this machine works - from the USB drive (won't mount - Debian records in /var/log/messages that the drive has been plugged in and all is well, but all attempts to use the mount command fail with a "Special File /dev/sdXX not found" error. It's true, they're not there (the /dev/ files). Where did they go? They were there yesterday (at least for a little while); they were there about 20 minutes ago when this same machine was running KNOPPIX from a LiveCD image (same source from which I so unfortunately installed this alleged OS called "Debian" - I will refer to it henceforth as "Debian-piece-of-crap" or "Debian POS" for short - [note that this is a run-on sentence which refers back to the "- from the USB dirve ..."] - to the freaking spell-checker in this stupid IceWeasel browser. As I type this, every word in the text input area is flagged as a misspelling - EVEN the ones that I specifically told StoopidWeasel to "Add to Dictionary" - simple shit like "for" and "to" and "an" and "the" and so on. WtF? "Check-as-you-type" spelling? Konqueror has had it for several versions/years now. Freaking MS WORD has it. AND IT WORKS [sort of, in word, but still].
I've heard for years now how Debian such a l33t "engineers" distro - I fought with obsolescent Debian versions in the lab, at work, thinking to myself "there has to be a good reason they chose this lame bullshi over [fill-in-the-blank-distro] that works" - I've [sort of] followe the FOSS debates where all the acolytes sing hoseanah to the great Debian-ness and how "at Debian they are really committed to FOSS."
I call bullshit. Debian is crap, and anyone who doesn't realize it is jst sucking up to the emporer, every bit as the tailors who pretended to make a suit. Linux is the emporer, Debian are the tailors, and the emporer has no clothes. Deal with it.
Now please excuse me while I go find and install a distro that actually works with some of this hardware that apparenlty is just to newfangled a gee-whiz-bang for Debian to have gotten around to - stuff that everybody else was supporting out-of-the-box 8 or 10 years ago - okay, maybe 5 or 6 years, but still...
And finally, I want to make as clear as possible the information that the Debian Package management tools [such as they are] a clearly sub-standard, inferior, user-unfriendly, and just generally suck ass compared to any other modern computing system standard of which I am aware.
I will never again reccomend Debian to anyone [except perhaps to enemies], and will not bother with the excuciating downloads of this Debian crapware. And KNOPPIX - well, you have mislead us all, KNOPPIX - all your fiddling and fixing to make this Debian bullshit run half-assed normal from a LiveCD - it really shows thru what crap Debian is when the KNOPPIX tweaks have are no there.
One final point - I installed the Debian-piece of crap to /dev/hda4 but that process somehow hosed the saved KNOPPIX LiveCD configuration on /dev/hda1 - there is no apparent way to get it back or to copy it over to the Debian-piece-of-crap partition, so not only does the Debian-piece-of-crap not work, it trashed the most stable configuration this machine has had since WinXP was removed, and didn't bother to either a) warn me it was about to trash my working config, or b) tell me that it had done so once it had hosed both the saved config and the new install.
So knoppix myconfig=/dev/hda1 doesn't work anymore - which I suppose is part of the greater plan by the Debian-piece-of-crtap manufacturers to eliminate Linux as a functional alternative OS.
