Daley Ponderings

My new server arrived last week, and it came preconfigured with Gentoo, so it booted up, and I checked it out, but I really want a Debian system, so tonight is my second attempt at getting it to install. The first attempt failed miserably, but...I had been having trouble with my usual installer, which uses a 2.2 kernel. The problem is that my network and hard drive cards are too new, and so weren't recognized. I found drivers (Intel 82541GI and 3-ware 8006-2) but had trouble compiling them for 2.2, as they wanted to be compiled for 2.4 or 2.6.
I asked on snurgle, and someone said that they thought it should just work, if I downloaded the 2.4 installer, which I hadn't realized existed.
So, I grabbed the sarge "business card" iso image, and after burning it to a cd, it booted up and auto detected the network and hard drives, suggested a decent partitioning scheme, and downloaded the packages quicker than I can type this post.
People have complained about the Debian installer in the past, but I think that complaining is over; this is how it is supposed to be. I don't think I would have had to make any decisions -- ie. if I were new to linux/Debian, it pretty much did everything for me.
The system probably isn't in the most secure state if you just let it do everything, but it isn't too shabby.
So, this means that my plans for getting my server ready by April might actually happen now, last week, it had looked like it was going to take forever.