The old server had been running Mandriva 2006.0 since sometime in late 2005. I never moved it to Mandriva 2007.0, mainly because after testing it I decided it was too unstable, even in the installer for me to bother going any further. I was quite happy with Mandriva 2006.0, and saw no reason to move to 2007.0 as it did not provide any significant (imho) improvements that I needed, or felt I could benefit from.
So as I approached the end of 2007, I thought it was time to upgrade the hardware, and with it investigate alternative distributions, especially seeing as Mandriva have eol’d 2006.0, and removed all existing updates from their mirrors :(.
I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop since early 2006, and seeing as it is a Debian derivative, I thought I’d give Debian another try.
I had tried Debian in the past (the distant past), and never liked it. I found dpkg bizarre, and always went back to the safety of my rpm based distros like Mandriva, and RedHat. Having now used Ubuntu for a considerable period, and setting up Ubuntu servers for friends, I gave in to the relentless pressure from my ILUG compatriots to switch to Debian.
Read the full article on my wiki (now Debian 5.0)