Re: [LUG] First impressions of Debian

I've finally got around to trying Debian after many years with Mandrake.

OK, I probably didn't make it easy by using an old Compaq Proliant
that's been sitting in the rack doing very little for a year or so, but
after a couple of days of getting kernel parameters sorted out I got it
installed from the "minimal" disc I downloaded and with another couple
of hours getting it to use the proxy I got apt-get talking to a couple
of mirrors and I think I NEVER want to see rpm again!!!!

You should have tried Ubuntu. No really, I believe it's far superior in terms of ease of use, etc... And they aren't quite as Neil in the way of Freedom(TM) as Debian are. I dislike their release cycle, however.. what's wrong with including Firefox 1.5 in Breezy?

Its definitely looking good so far and I'm determined to replace the 4
Mandrake servers I'm running at present with Debian in time.

Good...

The reason for this posting is to ask for suggestions as to books/good
howtos etc on managing Debian in general; having been used to utilities
such as "drakconf" I'm beginning to wonder where I go to set up the
network etc.

There's tons of documentation littering fora, mailing lists and the site..

Because Deb is wonderful, the network should auto-configure. Because GNOME are real nutcases about being compilable on POSIX, they don't have Red Hat's wonderful network configurator if it doesn't auto-configure (it's written in Python.)
However, you'll find the basic GNOME networking wotsit in the System > Administration menu.