[Discuss] Debian "Newbie" Questions

[R. McFarlane]

At 05:38 PM 5/5/2006, Murray Strome, had this to say :

>I finally gave up trying to get the prerequisites to Koha working on 
>Kubuntu, so I am now loading Debian Sarge and going through all the 
>Perl and other prerequisite setup stuff.  However, I am very new to 
>Debian (I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva for many years) and am 
>not sure that I understand some things.
>
>First, I have installed Debian on a new SATA drive (/dev/sd<n> I 
>think).  When I had installed Kubuntu, on the SATA drive,  all my 
>drives containing Mandriva stuff were mountable by mount /dev/hd{a or b}<n>.
>However, there are no /dev/hd<n> items listed with my Debian 
>installation.  Where are they? In Mandrake, the desktop system 
>configuration allows you to see all the drives -- is there something 
>equivalent in Debian?
>
>Second, Debian (sarge) has REALLY OLD versions of most applications 
>that I use regularly (like OpenOffice, GIMP, K3B and 
>Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird).  I am not sure what is the best/safest 
>way to install the latest stable releases of applications like these 
>in Debian.  With Mandriva, I usually tried to find a suitable .rpm 
>file as a first step, then used either the command line or the 
>Mandriva software package manager.  In some cases (I think Acroread 
>was one) I just used the installer that was downloaded from the 
>website.  However, in those latter cases, the package manager didn't 
>seem to be aware of them.
>Thanks for any help.


         I have been happy with Ubuntu thus far. 5.10 is great and 
the new 6 will be even more so. Well at least that is what the 
grapevine says. :)

         Hmmm, maybe I will reload it on my PowerBook tonight.


http://www.mcfarlanecomputing.net/