I spend most of the bank holiday weekend fixing my box at home after installing debian and making several stupid mistakes.
First I neglected to backup to a remote place all my important stuff, then I failed to write the new partition table to disk (selecting quit instead of save and not noticing) and hosed my /home (where about 4 years of collected code, documentation and data was accumulated) and /windoze_apps (where word, photoshop, etc are installed) partitions.
I saved my old /etc and /usr/local to /home before starting the install, but of course those went awol and now I can't connect to my ISP.
So I spent most of the time trying to get connected to the internet, downloading perl modules through windows, and installing all the stuff I need through apt-get.
The system still feels very bare and not shiny enough to justify the upgrade. Debian makes a great server distro but as a graphics workstation it is a bit behind-the-times.
