On Mon, Apr 26, 1999 at 11:24:35AM +0100, Enrique Zanardi wrote:
> > My diagnosis is that (a) dbootstrap "mountable" stuff seems to be
> > broken, and that is very bad, and (b) you have some PCMCIA stuff which
> > isn't supported by the slink pcmcia* packages.
> My diagnosis is that Anthony is using a very old version of the boot
> floppies. Please, try again with the version released on slink, and file
> bugs on the remaining bugs. I bet you won't find that many...
I've done (or at least watched) another couple of installs since now, and
they both worked fine. So it looks like the CDs I got sent just have old
versions of boot-floppies and stuff. *sigh*
Ummm. The thoughts on those installs were something along the lines of:
* It's a pity the i740 / XBF X servers aren't directly supported. There
were some RedHat drivers that worked well enough, or some such,
apparently.
* We installed the base system over NFS. Setting up an NFS server
sucks. That's not boot floppies fault though. :-/ Ummm. It'd have been
nice if the "Setup networking" were a more obvious alternative than
it actually was, possibly. (ie, listed as "Alternative:" rather than
right down the bottom somewhere). Also, setting up the networking
before installing the ethernet drivers doesn't work. Some warning
to this effect might be nice.
* Having support for ftp/http for the base system would get rid of the
only major hassle I'm having with installs these days. :)
* The option "Install operating system and modules" is confusing: I keep
thinking it's referring to the base system, and the guy who was
actually installing it was kinda shocked when he found out that the
rescue floppy was good enough for that. Perhaps "Install kernel" or
something would be a better term? [0]
* It's a bit confusing whether you actually need to install drivers. No
real suggestions on what to do about that.
* When setting up the network, I always get a little confused when
it asks for the `domain name'. Having an example, say, "The machine
example.hostname.com has a hostname of `example' and a domain name
`hostname.com'. What's your hostname?" might be nice.
* The guy who was doing the install hasn't done a Debian install since 1.2
or 1.3. He was very impressed with the preselections.
* Showing off Apt to newbies is fun. :)
* There seem to be less interactive postinsts than there used to be...
* We were very nervous when working out what to do to get Debian
installed without trashing the existing NT and 98 installations -- not
writing over the partitions so much as just being able to boot them
again afterwards without having to reinstall. Having the bootdisks
cope with this would be nice (ie, say "You have a VFAT drive, would
you like me to put that on the LILO menu as Win98?" or similar),
if it's at all feasible.
* Upgrading from the slink base straight to potato (without installing
slink proper first) has some odd problems. (*shock*! *horror*!)
The installs were on a DEC Multia or something similar (SCSI, Tulip,
i386); and a games machine (funky video card, i386). Both desktops. Both
went quite well.
Any possibility of getting current potato disks to do test installs from
any time soon (in the next month or so)? Not having to be particularly
up to date, but just so we can see what's going on, and not keep making
suggestions that you've already heard a million times and implemented
thrice over?
Cheers,
aj
[0] I subscribe to "operating system == kernel + system software"
school of thought; which is why this confuses me every now and again.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``There's nothing worse than people with a clue.
They're always disagreeing with you.''
-- Andrew Over
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