[Tfug] Back to Debian again - Now What?

[Craig Smith]

I have reinstalled Debian in lieu of Red Hat. Although
I liked the ease of installing Red Hat it seemed
difficult to update, I am sure it just of not being
familiar it. If I had my choice I would rather not pay
anything even at first. 

I have several spare hard drives all on removable
racks so it is just a matter of easily swapping out
hard drives and rebooting so I will also have a Red
Hat system to play  with along with Debian and Windows
2000 (the only system I am familiar with at the
moment). None of my three systems are dual bootable as
I am a bit caution during the learning phase.

What I want to do is move Pima County into open source
systems because they are generally FREE of cost
(discounting learning time), secure, and maintainable.

IMHO the commands for Linux are esoteric for a MS
Windows user and a bit overwhelming. Before I can
convince anyone to go to Linux I have to become
comfortable with it. I don't want to start flame wars,
I just want information to do the job.

Harry, you were right there was a bug in my Debian
Network Installation CD as all references in
/etc/apt/sources.list were to 'stable' rather than to
'testing'. I edited the file with your suggested
changes and it installed much more smoothly.

Red Hat automatically configured my floppy drive and
let me boot into X-Windows(Gnome and/or KDE). It also
semi-automatically set my default printer to my
Lexmark Z22 obviously I am going have to do this
manually in Debian. This is no problem as long as I
can set things up properly to my liking.

1. To shutdown I use the command:
   #shutdown now -h
        Is this correct or is there a better way?
2. To mount my floppy drive I use the command
   #mount /dev/fd0 /floppy/ -t vfat
       Is this correct? I may have mistyped it but I
got an error (directory not found??) when I get out of
Windows I will try it again so I can print out lspci
3.  I downloaded and installed vim with
   #apt-get install vim
       What else would you suggest I get?
4.  How do I set up my Lexmark Z22 as my default
printer?
5.  How do I get into a GUI environment?

Appreciate all of your help.
 

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