My Debian Odyssey Begins...

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

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.

> 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.
> 
> 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.

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.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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