FW: Comments from a first-time Debian install.....
From: tytso@valinux.com
I'm not on any of the Debian developer's mailing lists yet, and I didn't
want to send this to some inappropriate place. (I'd really rather not
replicate RMS's drive-by flaming on the tcl list from a few years ago.
:-)
However, I thought some Debian developers might appreciate these notes
which I took as I tried for the first time to actually install Debian
from scratch, as opposed to using apt-get on a system which someone else
had set up for me. These notes were taken from a perspective of a Linux
expert, but someone who's still relatively new to Debian install
procedures. I've tried to add some comments about how a novice would
react when presented with some of the challenges I faced, though, and I
think the bottom line is that Debian's install has gone a long way from
when Marc helped me install Debian 2.0 back in June, 1999. But if I
needed to give my parents or some other non-technical friends/relatives
a Linux distribution to install, it wouldn't be Debian; Red Hat or
Caldera simply have much friendly install systems.
Feel free to forward this (or pieces of it) wherever it might be
appropriate.
- Ted
Comments on Debian 2.2 install
===============================
(This is my first time installing Debian unasisted. The first time was
with Debian 2.0, with Marc Merlin doing the install of the base system,
and my being left to answer the hundreds of questions with no way of
getting back to the question, and being asked many, many times where the
newserver was. Glad that's no longer a problem.)
The debian install is much better than when I first saw it, but it
still has a lot of rough edges. Having tried Red Hat and Caldera's
installers, Debian still has a long way to go before a novice user
won't be intimidated by the install process.
Initial setup
=============
Far, far too many decision points. It's good to give flexibility to the
expert, but for most users it's too much. Suggestion: have a "basic"
and "expert" modes, where the "expert" mode eliminates some of the
decision points, and have a "back" button!!! Having a nice flow where
you can either initialize another partition, or go on --- and then
having experimented with a choice, go back to a previous choice point
---- is very sound and basic UI desing principles. There's a reason why
Microsoft Wizards are appreciated by novice users; Debian should take
advantage of their millions spent in UI research.
Another UI point. With three choices in the first few screens, it
will make it much more obvious which button is selected. Because the
background around each dialog box is blue, with blue meaning
"highlighted" and "red" meaning not highlighted", it's not clear which
is which. For a while I thought "red" meant highlighted....
I won't go into the X versus non-X installation, since there are some
real tradeoffs here, except to say that this kind of "warm and fuzzy"
thing certainly makes a difference with novice users.
The first time I did an initial install, PCMCIA was not configured
properly. I have a Vaio 505TX, and this kind of PCMCIA CD-ROM install
has been problematic before with other distributions. It was able to
boot from the PCMCIA CD-ROM; that part worked fine. However, it
bombed out trying to find the kernel and modules. I tried for a
while, but it appears there's no way to support that directly from the
CD-ROM given my hardware configuration. So I booted back into
Windows, created a scratch partition, and copied the entire Debian
Potato 2.2 Binary-i386 R0 CD-ROM into that scratch partition and then
tried again.
The second time I tried, I was able to load the kernel modules. This
screen here really needs simplifying. There's no reason to make the
user decide which modules should be loaded on a full system at such an
early point in the install. Regardless of where you fall on the
"modules should be dynamically loaded" versus the "modules should be
statically loaded at boot-time" argument, at the initial install time
only those modules which are desperately needed to install the system
should be asked for. If nothing else, deferring this means that the
installation system may have more resources at its disposal to provide
a more friendly interface to the user.
On this second install attempt, for some reason PCMCIA wasn't happy. I
did try to configure it, but it failed for some mysterious reason. It
didn't give any clear indication that PCMCIA had failed until later,
when the second install bombed out and I started investigating...
However, because it bombed out, it wasn't able to find the CD-ROM
automatically. So the system went into what I later discovered was
apt-setup, where one of the questions it asked me was whether I wanted
the non-free software or not. I said yes, but given that CD-1 (which I
had copied onto a spare partition) doesn't have non-free software, the
debian configuration system bombed out that that point ---- no obvious
way of restarting it, and nothing on the system except the base system.
I fiddled with it a while, and finally decided I was wasting my time, so
I rebooted the system, and reinstalled a third time, blowing away
everything from the 2nd try installation.
On the third install attempt, PCMCIA did come up correctly, so it
automatically found and asked me to insert each of the CD-ROM's one at
a time. That part worked well. Then I was asked to select a number
of task packages, which also was fairly easy (although for a novice
user, still probably more detail that they would find comfortable.)
And at the end of it, I finally a minimal, stable Debian 2.2 system.
Not bad, but there's no way in heck a novice user would have been able
to have gotten this install to work.....
Other Random Assorted Problems
================================
AnXious set asked me for which server to use. However, then when the
various X servers were installed, it said "no X server previously
selected; use this one?" when it loaded the SVGA server. (That's
sloppy, from a UI perspective --- the user will say, "I answered this
already! Why are you bothering me again?".) It also then installed
the VGA16 server, and asked the "should I use this X server" question.
(Why did it even bother to install VGA16 server? Oh, well.)
Networking was not set up automatically for me. The fact that I was
using a laptop with a PCMCIA networking card may have caused this; I
don't know if a system with a hard-wired networking card would have
fared better. I'm surprised that some kind of dhcp client isn't
suggested by task-laptop.
As a Linux expert, lots of packages I take for granted aren't
installed. For example, I had to manually apt-get gpm and strace.
(Or if there was a magical task package that would have found them, it
wasn't obvious from the install.) That's fine if the machine is on
the network, but it gets tiresome pretty quickly if you're not on the
network (or you're fighting to get on the network and you need why
various networking tools are failing....)
apt-setup seems to have a wierd bug. If you answer "no" to the non-free
question, it doesn't ask you about whether or not you want the contrib
software; but if you say yes, it will ask you about contrib software.
That doesn't seem to follow..... It would also be nice if it didn't
bomb out of non-free or contrib weren't present. A simple "they weren't
there, so I can't give you that part of the distribution", would have
been fine. (And would have saved me from having to do a complete
reinstall of the base setup from scratch, since at the time there was no
obvious way to restart the Debian system configuration script. See
above.)
Conclusion
===========
Installing Linux on any Laptop, especially with PCMCIA issues, both
for the CD-ROM and networking, is a very demanding test of a
distribution. And it's definitely the case that Debian is better than
I remember it being when I was first exposed to it a little over a
year and a half ago. As someone who's a Linux expert, but who was
unfamiliar with Debian, a year and a half ago, there was a lot about
installation and configuration process which simply generated
bewilderment and fear. With the Potato release, it's better; I've
learned a bit more about Debian, which has certainly helped, but a lot
of the rough edges have been definitely improved
However, there's still a lot of work to be done towards making the
install more simple. Debian is at the point right now where I still
can't recommend it in good conscience to a non-technical friend or
relative. The problems remain the same; most Debian developers rarely
install systems from scratch, and when they do, they're familiar
enough with the system that parts which are non-obvious to newcomers
don't bother them. (Ironically, if the upgrading required going
through the installation process, as it does with Red Hat, I'm sure
that people would have spent a lot more time making the process
smoother. The fact that Debian's upgrade process is so nice means
that the flaws in its installation process are masked to a certain
extent.)
Anyway, that's my perspective from doing a new Debian Install.
Perhaps some folks will find this useful. The intent was for this
document not to be a rant, but to be constructive criticism.
Hopefully it will be taken this way.
Theodore Ts'o
December 2000
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