Some of the first feedback I received about my recent column on the Debian Slink Point Five install told me to give the Storm Linux 2000 install a try. In fact, several people made that suggestion, breaking up the monotonous requests that I fall on my sword and commit hara-kiri for offending some adherents of the Debian faith.

Storm Linux is one of several Debian-based commercial offerings; its creators take pride in its ease of installation. I decided to try it, because if my criticisms of the Slink and Potato installs have any merit, surely it would be reflected in an easy and speedy commercial Debian install.

My bad luck with installing Debian from CD continued in my first experience with Storm Linux. After one quick drive-by install on CD, which resulted in a system sans NIC driver, I managed somehow to foul the CD's surface and could no longer boot or read from it after booting from a floppy. Baud karma, or something.

But since I did a network install of Potato in my last column, and the Storm Linux Website (see Resources for a link) says I could easily do the same with that distribution, I opted to do the network thing with Storm. Please note that network installation is not my preferred approach. I don't like to spend hours doing something I could accomplish in minutes. Call me lazy if you like; in fact, please do. All good dweebs are lazy, whether they are programmers, sysadmins, or hackers.

Installing Storm

I put the boxed set of Storm Linux 2000 CDs and diskettes back on the shelf and downloaded the image for the boot (boot1440.raw) diskette. I followed the instructions on the download page and used dd to copy the image to a floppy.

I booted Storm Linux on the machine I had installed Potato on the week before: a 300-MHz K6-2 CPU with 128 MB of RAM, an Asus 50x ATAPI CD, 32-MB Guillemot GeForce DDR video card, Soundblaster 16, and a RealTek 8139 Ethernet card.

I had to choose between English and French for the installation, then move my rodent so the installer could autodetect it. Storm then let me choose the language for my desktop from a list of nine, including French, Spanish, German, Portugese, Italian, and two variations of Svensk.

The installer used interactive feedback to decide on the correct keyboard bindings. I tapped on the appropriate key when it asked me to enter a specific character and it made the selection for me. Then it asked if I was installing on a laptop and whether I had any SCSI devices. I answered no to both.

When the installer asked me for my install source and I selected FTP,

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