apt-get remove Fedora; apt-get install Debian

After giving a thought about possibility of converting my Fedora box to Debian,yesterday morning, with DVD I got from LFY, I gave it a try. Why? I fed-up with problems like crippled mp3 support (for obvious reason for a pure OSS distro),slow and error-prone yum and problem with incompatible and conflicted packages from 3rd-party repositories. My journey with Fedora has ended. Maybe I'll meet her again in the future :). We'll see.

Debian 4.0 aka Etch
Installation went smooth in text mode. It took longer as I was expecting because without my knowledge,I opted to download updates from internet during installation. There was a flaw when I tried installing LILO boot loader. The installer said it failed to install. I opted to continue and after rebooting, the boot loader was fine. GNOME was the default Window Manager installed when I select the Desktop installation but as usual, with beloved apt-get, I could install other window managers too.

Some basic commands
apt-get update <--- find new updates if any. apt-get install package_name <--- install a package. Dependencies will be taken care of. apt-get --reinstall install package_name <--- reinstall a package. apt-get remove package_name <--- uninstall a package but the config files remain intact. apt-get --purge remove package_name <--- completely uninstall a package. apt-get -u dist-upgrade <--- completely upgrade the whole distribution to the latest. dpkg -i package_name.deb <-- install a local package apt-get reminds me of slapt-get in Slackware world. slapt-get got the idea from this excellence apt-get.


A few confusing matters
Firstly, I couldn't see Firefox in GNOME or KDE menu. So I fired up apt-get. To my surprise, it had been installed. I found out that it had been 'rebranded' to IceWeasel. What a name? More info on this matter can be read here.

Secondly, I couldn't find pidgin. Instead, the old GAIM was installed. After googling, pidgin could be installed by downloading from here.

The experience so far is good. It has its share of Ubuntu which is one of my favorite distro too. I like the responsiveness of KDE and GNOME. It seems quicker than on Fedora and of course, apt-get is a lot quicker than yum.