Debian 4.0 and Community

I installed Debian 4.0 on an older laptop the other day. I decided to install it without a window manager or a desktop for now. I have to say that I am very impressed.

The actual install process was very quick and painless. The wireless card, which is often the difficult thing to configure, was recognized and configured at boot. I was able to find my way around ifconfig, iwconfig, ifup and ifdown to get onto a secured network. I was also able to download screen very easily, and it has been fun playing around on the command line.

The only task I have done so far is to burn an .iso of some work stuff for our client. There is little or no documentation to be found for mkisofs and wodim (replacement for cdrecord). I had to fiddle around forever to get them to do what I wanted to do.

Which brings me to to my point – it is incredibly useful to have a community around whatever distro you are using. Because a lot of people do not use the command line to burn CDs, there is little or no documentation/help out there. At some point, some developer uses the commands to create a GUI tool to burn a CD, but their knowledge about the actual commands may never be documented online.