After putting my mini-ITX system in an usable (although not fully assembled) state, I installed Ubuntu, gave it a quick glance and went for Debian. Ubuntu is just too bloated for my taste.

Anyhow, I downloaded the debian-installer rc2 netinst iso and started the installation using the 2.6 install-kernel. Everything went as expected until bootloader installation: neither grub nor lilo wanted to install themselves.

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I received the VIA EPIA MII 12000 yesterday. Poor VIA, they haven’t even packaged a manual. After finding the docs, fiddling around with the poor labeled connectors, replacing a screw of the cd-bay lid with a shorter one so my harddrive fits in, the box is assembled. Mostly. The CD-RW drive is still missing.

Not even four days online and I already have spam all over the place. Well: Fuck you!. Isn’t there some sort of Spamassassin for WordPress? I guess I just go digging through the plug-in pages and see what i can find.

I ordered a Silverstone LC09 mini-ITX case along with a VIA EPIA MII 12000 last week.. while the case arrived today, the board is still to come. Anyhow, for i won’t have the time to assemble the whole thing the next few days I might as well be patient.

Installing Debian (maybe Ubuntu) on this thing will probably be a whole different story. The installation itself should be a piece of cake but getting everything to work smooth and nicely (hardware MPEG2 decoding, FB-support..) might me a little bit tricky. So far, most howtos I found just don’t back up what was written in the howto before

While X.Org has been uploaded to Ubuntu’s ‘Hoary’, native Debian packages will not be introduced until Sarge is released, and like every Debian release, this may take a while. For Ubuntu is based on Debian and the packages are maintained by Daniel Stone and his colleagues, why not try some distribution-mixing?

I posted some hints on this in the Unofficial Debian User Forums and wrote a more detailed, but german description which can be found at debianforum.de.

For those who don’t want to fiddle around with their running XFree86 installation, Steve Smith wrote a description how to install a non-intrusive X.org server from source.