Debian. Neophytes run for their lives at the very mention of the distribution. This is hardcore stuff -- the install from hell. You must have Biblical familiarity with every IRQ and device on your system to even dream of installing Debian. Better to stick with Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, or Caldera than to risk stubbing your ego on a Debian install.

Hey, a lot of people think that. When I saw the boxes of Debian GNU/Linux that VA Linux was giving away at the LinuxWorld Expo, I decided it was a challenge I could no longer ignore. Of course, I wasn't sure if I would ever write about the experience -- especially if I failed. But here it is, the story of one man's rite of passage and the toughest install Linux has to offer.

I slid the removable IDE drive containing SuSE 6.4 and Soldier of Fortune from my system, then replaced it with a brand new 20-GB Fujitsu. I was as ready as possible; I knew the hardware fairly well, having installed SuSE and Red Hat multiple times on that same box over the past few months. I changed the BIOS to
boot from the CD and began my journey to the Promised Land.

I thought it strange that the first screen to appear following the boot announced, "This is the Debian Rescue Floppy." But I ignored that and pressed onward. I selected Color as the type of display, and qwerty/us as the keyboard. It would take more than qwerty/dvorak to throw this hound off the scent.

Then it was time to hack the new hard drive. I created a 128-MB swap partition and gave the rest to root. I answered yes to the "Check for Bad Block" query, but regretted that decision; it takes a long time to check a 20-GB drive. It eventually completed, though.

Hey, maybe this wasn't going to be so tough after all. After saying "yes" when asked if I wanted to mount /dev/hda2 as root, I got into the nuts and bolts of the installation. First, I was asked to choose a source for the kernel and modules; naturally, I chose CD-ROM. Then it asked what type of CD interface I had, and presented me with a long list of possibilities. I chose the ATAPI (IDE) hdb option, which the installer said was the second drive on the primary IDE controller. I wondered why the installer didn't already know what my CD interface was, since it had been reading from it for several minutes.

The installer then asked me to enter the path where the Debian archive resides.
Luckily, it suggested the default of /debian and I guessed that was it. Then it asked

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