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From: www.itworld.com
Sunny skies with Storm Linux 2000
March 20, 2001 —
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, it prompted me for the driver diskette. I chose to use the one that came in the box, rather than download a new one.
A minor nit here: The window that asked me to load the driver diskette overlaid a screen that asked me to select the proper driver for my NIC. It was so jumbled that it took a few seconds to sort it out. Once the driver diskette was inserted and read, however, the top window disappeared and all became clear. Storm identified my NIC, and all I had to do to load the RTL8139 driver was hit Enter.
Next came network setup. I filled in the blanks with my IP address, netmask and gateway, and DNS addresses. It had already filled in eth0 as my interface.
A screen with instructions for the FTP install appeared. It explained that I needed to tend to my hard disk partitioning before I began the FTP session. I pressed Alt-F2 to start a console terminal from which I could run cfdisk. Once I was satisfied with my partitioning chores (to keep it simple, I created only a swap and a Linux partition), I pressed Alt-F1 and returned to the install process.
Then I selected a partition to use for the install, and the installer formatted it. I was no more than 10 minutes into the installation when an FTP session began to grab the 35-MB base install file from the Stormix site. I'm not sure how long the download took; I wandered off, and it finished before I got back.
When I returned, I found myself in a graphical install that began by showing that it had correctly detected my Ethernet and video cards. After asking where to mount the root partition (the option to format the partition had been grayed out), it took me through the LILO setup.
Did I want to run X Server, it asked? Yes, I said. Did I want to follow its recommendation and start X automatically at boot time, it asked? No, I did not. Then I selected a monitor whose horizontal and vertical refresh rates were equivalent to my own, told it that I wanted 1280x1024 resolution at a depth of 16 bits (64-KB colors), and tested the selected X configuration. It worked fine.
The final part of the X install and configuration was deciding whether to use either of the KDE or GNOME desktop environments. I chose both, specifying KDE as the default. My normal choice is Helix GNOME, but choosing KDE will give me an easy upgrade to KDE2, which should appear at about the same time as this column.
Next, Storm asked again for my network settings. Another minor complaint: why should it ask me to provide this information twice? Then came user setup and time zone selection. Did I want the "typical" package selection or did I want to select packages for myself? For simplicity's sake, I chose "typical." The second stage of the install had taken between 10 and 15 minutes. Then the long FTP process began. I found other things to do for the next six hours or so.
I returned to a screen that said the system had been set up and told me to press Enter to reboot. I did, and then spent no more than five minutes on the final configuration of Storm Linux. I logged in, the KDE desktop appeared, and I began surfing with Netscape 4.75. Total time spent face-to-face with the installer: approximately 30 minutes.
The verdict
The Storm Linux 2000 install is not perfect by any means, but I think it is the best of any distribution I've tried. It is quick and easy and it all worked when it was done. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give it an 8.5, as compared to a 3 for Debian's Slink Point Five and a 6 for Potato.
But I wonder if Debian gurus would like the Storm Linux 2000 install as much as I do. Perhaps not. Joey Hess, who leads the team that is redesigning Debian's installer, pointed out that the Debian install is difficult because it meets the needs of gurus who may have to install it on problematic hardware. My dream install, on the other hand, would work for newbie and guru alike without giving either short shrift. I believe the Storm install comes much closer to that goal than Potato. Or, for that matter, any other distribution I've tried.
Can I now "upgrade" my Storm Linux 2000 to Debian? I'm not sure. I've heard conflicting stories about moving from Storm to Debian. But I am going to try. Hopefully it won't require much more than pointing my sources for apt to debian.org instead of stormix.com, then running apt-get update, followed by either apt-get upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade. Before I go there, however, I'll spend some time on the #debian channel on irc.openprojects.net to pick up some pointers as I proceed.
- Storm Linux homepage:
http://www.stormix.com - Debian GNU/Linux homepage:
http://www.debian.org
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