My Debian Odyssey Begins...

[Nathan Saper]

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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
>  __) | | \________________________________________________________________
> Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903
> 
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> 

- --

Nathan Saper
natedog@well.com (PGP)
nsaper@sprintpcs.com (cell phone, no PGP)
http://www.well.com/user/natedog/
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