Installing Debian

I decided to give Debian a try. I have heard so much about it, and since I have been using the Debian-based Ubuntu for a while, I wanted to check it out.

Debian has just been released in ver 4.0. Debian is released on 21 CDs, but with a broadband Interweb connection, you will only need the first.

After preparing a system in Virtualbox, and preparing the partitions, I was ready for the install. Debian uses an installer like the older versions of Ubuntu. It is quite easy to use (except for the formating issues described earlier). In addition to the first install CD, some packages where fetched from the net.

Booting and starting my new system, was very much like Ubuntu (not surprising). The Gnome desktop is default for Debian, and it looked more or less like Ubuntu (but was not brown).

I decided to check if my system was up to date, using the " sudo aptitude update" command. To my surprise, that didn't work. In fact I got a lot of error messages.

After searching on the Interweb, I discovered that the "sudo" command isn't activated or installed by default in Debian. Also, Debian uses root-account (disabled in Ubuntu) and user-accounts. In order to get sudo-to work I needed to switch to root:

su -

And then install sudo:

aptitude install sudo

Then I needed to give my user privileges to run "sudo". Running visudo as root, I edited the line reading

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

and substituded "root" with my username

adder1972 ALL=(ALL) ALL

After quiting the terminal and restarting it (since I don't know how to log out as root yet ....), I was now able to run "sudo" as my regular user (+ password, of course)

To test that everything worked, I typed

whoami (answer: adder1972)

and

sudo whoami (answer: root)