Debian!

The Ubuntu people have done some dickish things recently, so I decided I'd like to move to a different distro. Maybe if enough people do that they'll stop being dicks, because tho core of their dickishness seems to be "we want the entire Linux community to become The Ubuntu Community," and I'm not super-comfortable with that, you know? So today I decided to install Debian.

And there my troubles began.

So I boot up this live CD. It complains about my graphics card, which I expected, but runs at high res anyway, which makes me happy. It also complains about my network card, which was a little odd, but fixable. I set about backing up my Ubuntu home directory, then install it over Ubuntu. The first problem I run into is that the installer totally refuses to install Grub, or even give me an error message why. So I figure, nothing else to do at this point, let it finish the install of the unbootable OS, then go in and try to fix it later.

Which is about when I first notice that it screwed me: without Grub, Windows won't boot either, because Ubuntu had wiped the master boot record to install Grub in the first place, so when Debian (apparently) blew away Ubuntu's loader and put nothing in its place, now the machine wouldn't boot anything.

Okay, don't panic, there are like five other computers in this house. I downloaded something called Rescatux (which I cannot recommend enough) and booted from it. It's like a boot disk on steroids, which can be used to fix most broken installs of Linux (or Windows, theoretically). Rescatux wouldn't install Grub either, though. This was getting strange. After trying various things with it, I finally totally reinstalled Debian, but this time not from a live CD, instead from the normal installer. Grub still wouldn't install then, but Rescatux could install it. So now I had Grub up and running and I could boot into Linux.

At this point, Windows was still broken, and that worried me. Windows isn't big on recovery tools. If you boot off the install disc, it gives you an option to "refresh your system," which "won't harm any of your files!" (but which will delete any programs you've installed not through the Windows app store, so, uh, no.) But a little Googling (on my phone, because remember that the only OS I can boot still doesn't recognize my network card) showed me the commands in the Windows recovery console (they will actually give you a Windows console, thankfully, from the install disc) to fix the master boot record. So I did that, and fixed the boot sector, and fixed the BCD (where Windows stores such unimportant-sounding files as "loadwin.exe"). Apparently my Grub problems managed to hose all three of these places.

So now I had a machine that would boot to Windows. But Windows, in the process of healing itself, wiped Grub. I just... I haven't the words.

But, I now had a machine that could get on the network. So I downloaded the Linux network card driver. Then, after punching the walls for a little bit, I went back into Rescatux and reinstalled Grub, and booted back into Linux. With the driver, I was able to get Linux on the network, and download the video card drivers.

Now I was in business. Except. Apparently there's a decent amount of setup that Debian wants to do during installation, like setting up apt-get repositories, assigning network interfaces to devices, that sort of thing, and if you don't have a network card during install, then you're just out of luck. So I had to figure out how to do that by hand.

I think I finally have it all set up now. Or at least in a place where I can set it up. I still need to install all my software again. On the other hand, I do like Debian a lot, past the horrible install debacle. It's like Ubuntu Gnome, minus all the Ubuntu crap. I think Ubuntu really lost me when I opened the (default) package manager and saw prices next to things. Very un-Linux.