Debian Squeeze

After hearing a lot about it, I decided to check out the new Debian GNU/Linux release: 6.0, informally known as Squeeze.

My home desktop/workstation has been running Ubuntu 10.04 for almost a year. Pretty good, very little fuss but I’m never satisfied with anything. So I downloaded the multiarch 32-bit/64-bit DVD image (pretty cool trick, by the way) and wrote it to a spare USB drive.

The actual installation was great! It detected all my previously created LVM configuration and all of the filesystems on top of it which I was thankful for as I have a fairly complex setup involving an SSD, RAIDs and all sorts of layers sitting on top of them.

After the installation, though, things not so peachy. Not totally unexpected, but still unwelcome.

I have a fairly new graphics card (NVIDIA GTX 570) which, paired with the fairly new open-source nvidia driver, Nouveau, resulted in a steaming pile of fail. Monitors not being detected, system hangs, visual corruption – you name it, it happened.

As it turns out, the binary NVIDIA driver that comes with squeeze doesn’t correctly support this hardware either. FOILED. Fuck it, lets run sid! So I upgraded the system to the rolling unstable distribution known as sid. sid comes with a new version of Nouveau but not new enough it seems – it’s going to be a while before I’ll be able get this card going with that driver. The good news is it also comes with a newer version of the NVIDIA binary driver so I installed that and it seems to be working fine now.

I decided to stick with GNOME as my desktop environment for now, but I’m looking at taking a serious stab at building my own environment around a tiling window manager. I had a quick look at XMonad, i3 and awesome. I’ll probably go with awesome WM and a couple of other tweaks.

On my netbook, I installed Crunchbang 10 – which is based on squeeze. One pleasant surprise was that Debian shipped with the new Broadcom driver in the kernel so that worked out-of-the box… almost unheard of outside of Intel cards! A few unpleasant surprises includes infrequent hard hangs which I need to reboot the system entirely to rectify, and the fact that the included and much more responsive Liquorix kernel didn’t include that Broadcom driver sort-of sucked… Hopefully that will be fixed with an update!