Once again I learn the lesson that Debian is not a distro for the newbie.

I should mention that the installation of Debian 5 "Lenny" on my wife's computer went smoothly. It started right up, and had no problem connecting to the Internet for updates. And I was able to add a new user account and install some needed packages (about which I shall report later). But then, wham! Two brick walls.

Static Network Assignments. Like every other desktop OS, by default Debian uses dynamic configuration (via DHCP) for networking. But I need to assign this machine a static IP address, and I want to manually select DNS servers (OpenDNS). So, I went into the KDE Control Center, under "Internet and Network", "Network Settings." Under the "Network Interfaces" tab I specified the static IP address (and netmask and gateway), and under the "Domain Name System" tab I specified the DNS servers. All worked fine.

That is, until the next time I rebooted. It seems that Debian remembered the static IP address, but failed to remember the gateway and DNS servers. I tried specifying those directly in /etc/network/interfaces, and doing "/etc/init.d/networking restart", and that worked. Until the next reboot.

To summarize a few hours of experimentation, I can either
(a) use DHCP, or
(b) manually type "/etc/init.d/networking restart" every time I reboot.
The latter is not a requirement I want to impose on my wife. She will quite rightly ask, "why doesn't my computer just work?"

I should note that I was able to make these very changes on my own desktop when I installed Debian. I can think of only two differences: (a) I originally installed Debian 4, and upgraded to 5; and (b) because I installed the Gnome CD-ROM by mistake, and later switched to KDE, I used the Gnome Network Manager instead of the KDE Control Center to set my configuration.

(As an aside, I note that on my own machine the KDE Control Center now reports "Your platform is not supported" and requires me to specify my distro. I guess this happened since I upgraded from Debian 4 to Debian 5. I can specify Debian 5, but it doesn't remember the choice.)

I may try loading the Gnome Network Manager (with a lot of added baggage!) to see if that makes a difference. And I'll do some Internet research. But if I can't get this straightened out, I'll yank Debian from this computer and switch to something else.

Sound. Sound cards are often a weak point for Linux distros, so I was relieved when the sound worked right away after I installed Debian.

Then, the next day, my wife reported that the sound wasn't working. And I confirmed this -- it wasn't working at all.

This morning I discovered, quite by accident, that when I log in on her machine using my account, the sound works. When I log in as her, there's no sound. This leads me to think there's a problem with the KDE configuration files. I just moved her home directory over to Debian, without regenerating those files; so it's likely that some configuration switch from her previous distro (Xandros 4/KDE 3) is failing in the new distro (with KDE 3.5).

I should be able to find this by comparing her KDE configuration to mine. But once again, this is not something that a new user would be able -- or should be required -- to do. C'mon, people: it needs to "just work."