AMD64 etch impressions

[David Meggy <davidmeggy@yahoo.ca>]

Hi

BTW: thanks for the advice in getting the installer beta

I had read on the mailing list of users complaining about packages not
been available for AMD64, but most of these were for non-free and
specific items like openoffice.  I just installed etch daily snapshot
installer, and then tried to install gnome, and ran into a lot of
problems.

1) I could not use security.debian.org (not a big issue as this is a
testing release for an unofficial port)

2) locales didn't seem to configure on its own.  I had to mainly run
this to generate the locale information for UTF-8 en_ca, en_gb, and
en_us.

3) Unless I ran with LANG=C, aptitude is very hard to use.  The normal
ascii graphics have turned into bizarre characters.  Ncurses problem?

4) I could not install gnome

5) Reason for 4), there was no Python in Etch, amongst other problems.

I modified /etc/apt/sources.list to include both Sarge and Etch, and
this was able to bring in Python and the rest of the requirements to
install Gnome, but I'm very curious as to why there are packages in
AMD64 Sarge, but not Etch.

My sources.list file ( I actually removed the mirror, and went back to
the main sources, as the mirror took forever)

# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
# deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

#Sarge
deb http://amd64.debian.net/debian/ sarge main contrib non-free
deb-src http://amd64.debian.net/debian/ sarge main contrib non-free

#Etch
deb http://amd64.debian.net/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://amd64.debian.net/debian/ etch main contrib non-free

6) Once I realized the mirror I had chosen was extremely slow, it did
not seem obvious to me, how to go back and select another mirror within
the installer.  Instead I just waited an hour for the base packages to
come in very slowly.

I hope these comments are helpful
David
-- 
David Meggy <davidmeggy@yahoo.ca>