I've just leased a Debian server from Server Beach. I've managed to upgrade it from 3.0 to 3.1 and install a few apps I want to play with.
However I'm a recovering RedHat user and therefore very green when it comes to Debian. ;) I would appreciate any sage advice/tips to help me transition from people (Daniel?, Perry?) who've made the switch before.
I think there are some tips around on the wiki in various places, and there are websites around that provide useful help, although I can't for the life of me remember them. The fundamental differences lie in: * package management, which probably isn't so different from FC now anyway * Use aptitude now, not apt-get * aptitude dist-uprade does different things to aptitude upgrade. I always use dist-upgrade and have no problems, I've had packages kept back when just using upgrade. Other people suggest other things. * packaging itself. .deb files are fairly different to .rpm, in the ways you can manipulate them. EG, I've yet to find a way to do an MD5 sum verification on all files in a .deb - something I found incredibly useful when trying to diagnose a compromised machine * Use dpkg -L <packagename> to get a list of the files in a package * Use dpkg -l <packagespec> to get a list of installed packages matching packagespec. dpkg -l on it's own lists all packages installed * configuration in /etc is different. No more /etc/sysconfig, etc. This will always take a while to come to grips with. Use dpkg -L <package> | grep /etc to list the files in /etc * Building packages from source is slightly more complicated than a .spec file, but you get used to it.