Re: Just loaded debian, how do I help?
On Thu, 23 Oct 1997, Christopher C Chimelis wrote:
> What exactly do you mean by "not as stable/usable"? My UDB hasn't crashed
> and burned in many months and have had no problems with usability at all.
Well, one problem was the install process, but I don't expect that to be
smooth yet -- the distribution is labeled "unstable". Lots of "dpkg
--force-depends" and symlinks in /lib were needed.
The system date is messed up on startup. Apparently the system doesn't
realize my clock is set to local time, ARC (it thinks it's universal time,
non-ARC). My hack to get past this was to copy the RedHat "/sbin/clock"
utility and run it by hand for now.
PPP wasn't connecting (which is important since this box is my router at
home). I tried recompiling pppd from source and I tried fiddling with
nsswitch.conf, and that didn't work. What *did* work was to grab the RedHat
pppd binary, put symlinks in /lib so it found the Debian versions of the
shared libraries it needed, and use that. This is gross, and will probably be
the first thing I try to really fix.
Also, I couldn't install sendmail, but that might have been a packaging
problem -- I'll try it again, and then try from source, and see what happens.
> In fact, I would say that my UDB is more stable and usable than my Pentium
> with Debian is.
At work, we've got AMD 5x86 boxes running Debian 1.3.1, and the main server
for my domain ({www,ftp,smtp}.aisb.org) is a 486SL running Debian 1.3.1.
They're all rock solid with no troubles at all for months at a time. My
Debian/Alpha box isn't there *yet*...
> Also, what we apparently need is a good document detailing installation
> instructions. We were *just* tossing a "nano-FAQ" around today regarding
> this and could use some help since most of us here did our installs back
> before the days when boot disks were available. If you could lend some
> assistance there, it would be greatly appreciated! :)
I'll try to write one up in HTML tomorow, test it on a blank SCSI disk (I've
got a few more laying around), and put it up somewhere if the procedure works.
> I have fakeroot packaged and tested (it DOES work! it does throw out some
> unaligned trap warnings, though, which are REALLY ugly to fix). You may
> want to install that package before granting package-building access to
> the world since it's MUCH preferred over sudo.
I'll give it a try in a few minutes.
> I know I appreciate the offer, though, as do a few others I'm sure. We're
> currently working on trying to get access to a 500MHz Alpha PC164 (at
> least, I'm working on it :P) for larger packages (the basics of X were
> just built on a 500MHz Alpha, fyi, and it's a good thing since it took my
> UDB over 12 hours to compile it).
FWIW, I went with the 233MHz UDB (most other folks I've seen have the slower
model), so compiles may go a *little* faster. If not, I'm used to waiting --
I just set up Debian 1.3.1 on a 386 a few days ago (as a backup router/server
in case something else fails). You should see how long compiles take on
*that*...
--
Doug DeJulio | mailto:ddj@aisb.org
Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria | http://www.aisb.org/~ddj/
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