An "Arch-like" Debian Testing !

Well, I finally made my own cooking, thanks to all people whom advices I have read here and there in the world wide web...

I decided to keep my working Ubuntu Hardy and Arch partition, and use the 3rd partition available to setup a minimal install of Debian Testing, following this guide: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/432

But I didn't install any GDM or XDM... Stciked to startx...

Only OpenBox (with PyPanel...)

Enjoyed reading this gentleman's choice of apps: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/software/

That gave me some good tips, so I installed Mirage (to view photos), ePDFView (instead of xPDF), Leafpad (instead of Mousepad)...

Aterm for a terminal, Exaile for music, radio & podcasts, Claws-mail, Emesene for MSN messenger Alsamixergui for sound control,  and for the rest, very classical apps such as Iceweasel, Opera, Skype, Abiword/Gnumeric, PCManFM, TVtime, Brasero, Transission, aMule, Picasa, Gimp...

I must say I am not yet very used to OpenBox (I have always used Fluxbox for lightweight...), but it seems a dynamic community of users, and I have been reading those guides: http://urukrama.wordpress.com/openbox-guide/ as well as the one from the Arch wiki...

Very informative !

Needless to say the PC boots in no time !!!

One thing, I kept a 32bit Debian, despite having this 64bit amd Sempron... I just don't want to mix any libs... I am on a 486 kernel, might upgrade to 686... Not sure yet...

So the whole concept of this install was to do it "the Arch way", but with a Debian Testing base, since it is my area of choice...

Of course, I will miss my good ol' Nautilus, but the whole point of that is not to install Gnome... And if I really need to connect to other PC's (which I will !), that mean I'll have to reboot into either Ubuntu or Arch :(

Or learn how to better handle ssh and smb without Nautilus... But I am so used to the easy gui thing... We'll see...