On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 03:09:51PM +0000, Nathan Saper wrote:
> > OK, so I finally got my laptop back from the repair shop yesterday, and,
> > too my obvious horror, my Linux partitions had been deleted, and I just
> > had one big fat Win95 install. Vowing to make the best of the situation,
> > I decided to try Debian, instead of just reinstalling Redhat. I made the
> > 17 install disks for 2.2, booted up, and started downloading. The install
>
> It's much easier if you already have a Linux box on the network,
> so you can use NFS to install the "base" file.
>
> > 1) The default install has some obvious things missing. (I did the
> > default install cus I was feeling lazy.) For one, it's missing important
> > devel libraries, such as the ncurses static libraries. This seems like
>
> You can choose development stuff, that's one of the choices when it asks
> you for what category of stuff you want before running dselect.
>
Did that. Chose all devel stuff, including all C and C++. Still, I'm
missing lots of static libraries.
> > 2) Doesn't configure X during install. This doesn't bother me,
> > but I can see where a new user would be pretty freaked just looking at a
> > command prompt.
>
> I can remember it running XF86Config (the shell script that asks questions
> about your hardware). And if you install xdm, it should come up into
> X automatically after a reboot, without further intervention. It might
> be better if it offered to run XF86Setup instead of XF86Config though.
> But if you only chose the minimal install, I don't think that includes
> X.
Didn't do that for me. And I installed xdm and X. Odd. Maybe my install
got screwed up somehow...
> >
> > 3) Dselect is weird. This is just a personal thing; I know some people
> > love dselect, but I'm having issues with it. For example, even if I tell
> > it to just grab one package, it ends up wanting to grap 35mb worth of
> > shit. What I'm doing right now is just using dselect to find packages,
>
> Well selections are persistent; if you select something and it has
> dependencies, then even if you deselect the thing which triggered all
> the dependencies, the dependencies still stay selected, and exiting
> dselect (however rudely, even kill -9) and coming back in won't change
> it, either. That's annoying. And its key-mappings are weird. Like the
> way it offers help too often, and then makes you hit space to exit...
> space is not a natural thing you'd think of to exit anything. Hopefully
> the graphical alternatives will be mainstream in a couple more years.
>
Maybe something GNOME would be nice...
> I recently re-installed Slackware 3.0 on an old machine because I wanted
> to try to compile a 1.2 kernel (long story)... talk about a fast and
> easy install, and compact too! I installed everything I needed to
> compile a kernel, and 2 versions of the kernel source, on an 80 meg
> partition and still had room left over. dselect is slow on old 486's
> because it's written in Perl, at least that's my theory.
>
Slackware 3.0 was the first distro I ever used. Sometimes I still miss
its simplicity...
And then kernel 2.0 and libc6 came along, and trying to upgrade Slackware
was just too much of a pain in the ass.
> --
> _______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud@bigfoot.com
> (_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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>
- --
Nathan Saper
natedog@well.com (PGP)
nsaper@sprintpcs.com (cell phone, no PGP)
http://www.well.com/user/natedog/
PGP Key ID: 9AD0F382
PGP Key Fingerprint: 743D FE2C 7F2E 7CAE 4A5F 0B19 D855 B205 9AD0 F382
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