Lenny installation successful
Other than the problems with "aptitude" and my CD-ROM drive, the
installation went smoothly. The CD-ROM drive issue turned out to be a
matter of insufficient lubrication. When the drawer closes, the loading
mechanism normally moves into place with a definite "clunk". On those
occasions where the drawer wasn't staying closed, the "clunk" was
softer, higher-pitched, not as solid, etc., i.e., the loading mechanism
was only partially engaging. A bit of Lubriplate (white lithium grease)
in the appropriate places, and a 13-year-old CD-ROM drive is as good as
new. Yes, that kind of effort for an old piece of equipment seems
excessive, but given that SRM seems to be so #$%@! picky about the
optical drive...
Somehow, even with networking enabled and configured during the install,
the system clock said the year was 2055 after rebooting from the hard
disk. Early during the installation process, the installer claimed it
was setting the date and time using NTP, but I'm guessing no
"hwclock --utc --systohc" or equivalent was done before the reboot.
That probably ought to be added to the "cleanup" items: don't do it
blindly though -- prompt for confirmation.
On the matter of X11, the latest servers strongly prefer to
autoconfigure everything, i.e., no xorg.conf (or a minimal one at best).
The problem with that is, the default depth and resolution seem to be
selected with no consideration given to maintaining a proper aspect ratio
for the display device. The algorithm seems to be, select the highest
depth supported by the hardware, then the highest resolution at that
depth. For my Radeon card driving a 15" CRT, the selected video mode
was 1280x768x24: ugh! To get to a more proper 1280x1024, I had to force
the default depth down to 16 bpp. Alternatively, I could have gone with
1024x768x24 if I really needed to run at that depth.
--
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Bob Tracy | "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit
rct@frus.com | upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin
| slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken
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