Last Saturday, I went with many friends to the local installment of FLISOL, a big install fest done across Latin America on the same day.

It was a nice event, seeing a lot of people from the local community helping newbies to install their first GNU/Linux. Most of the installations were -not surprisingly- Ubuntus. I was very surprised of Feisty: the installer is really simple and powerful for desktop users, and once installed, there are a lot of things that I'd really like to see in Debian.

But, everything cames with a price. Don't ever try to install it without enough RAM (the site says 256MiB). The graphical installer won't even boot (OOM killer kills the machine for you). If you download the alternate CD, which uses d-i, it will seem to work, but you'll notice a system which is a trashing hell: for starters, the restricted modules are kept in a tmpfs, eating over 30MiB of RAM! I tried unsuccessfully to trim it a little to make it work on a old laptop of a friend (only 64MiB of RAM), removing the tmpfs, killing daemons and stuff... But not even xfce will run on it: when I opened a terminal the whole X session will crash instantly.

So now, I'm starting a etch install on it. It will involve some work to make a end-user-friendly desktop, but I'm confident there is a way of making it work. Ubuntu just works in most cases, but when it doesn't, it's much more difficult to tweak. YMMV.