Re: 2.1.4 install disks seem to work for me on i386
On Thu, Jan 07, 1999 at 10:23:22AM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Thursday 7 January 1999, at 0 h 19,
> Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@worldvisions.ca> wrote:
>
> > - cfdisk refused to run because the partition table on this (I think
> > brand new) drive was garbled.
>
> I had the same problem, and I had to fix it in the BIOS (I don't know why
> but the geometry was set - wrongly - in the BIOS). cfdisk says nothing, it
> just returns, too quickly to read the error messages. Bug #29153 reports a
> similar problem and the workaround it suggests seems fine (in
> partition_config.c):
I guess. My BIOS geometry was right, but I had to wipe some crazy-looking
partitions in plain fdisk before cfdisk would see it.
Better still if cfdisk would just work (fdisk does) or the boot disks would
run fdisk for you (or ask if you want to) when cfdisk fails.
> > - I didn't choose the "make debian bootable directly from hard disk"
> > option. It didn't run lilo, which is what I wanted, but it didn't
> > even make /etc/lilo.conf, which was kind of surprising when I went
> > to install it later.
>
> Well, this can be discussed. The author of bug #31559 seems to disagree
> with you.
Reading through this bug, I don't think he disagrees with me. I agree that
there should be a way to skip both bootdisk creation and lilo install
(though it should be hard to do it by accident). In fact, I wanted to skip
both of those steps in this case.
However, it should still create the /etc/lilo.conf file anyway, since that
seems to happen non-interactively and may save people grief later when they
finally realize they need a method of booting :)
> > - I chose "Standard Workstation" for my package preselections, and it
> > wanted to install tetex and ALL THREE versions of emacs. I think
> > many people don't use latex anymore,
>
> That's your opinion. Remember it is the only free package to produce paper
> documents.
Yeah, I guess. The popularity-contest does in fact show tex as a pretty
popular set of packages. I noticed that during installation, tetex was one
of the slowest packages (set of packages) to install.
We'll know much more about people's likes and dislikes once Debian 2.1 is
released and the popularity-contest package gets installed by more than just
developers.
(Incidentally, my vote is to include that in most or all package
preselections!)
> > but could we at least choose
> > only one emacs as the default?
>
> Suggestions welcome and I'll update the files. xemacs seems to be a good
> choice for a "Standard workstation". I still have problems with emacs20
> and the composed characters since it dropped iso-syntax (no problems with
> emacs19).
xemacs20 is currently winning by a bit in the popularity contest, followed
by emacs20, and trailed by the much less popular emacs19. People who care
about these things, of course, will be sure to choose their preferred
environment in dselect anyway. People who don't know, probably appreciate
that we choose one for them.
> > - It didn't install XF86Setup, xterm, or twm by default.
>
> xterm and xf86setup are serious mistakes (they were in xbase in hamm). I fix
> it in the "master" file (in the CVS tree in a few minutes). This will be in
> 2.1.5, I presume. Thanks for the bug report!
>
> twm, yes. This is a choice (James van Zandt disagreed) because the new X
> in slink exploded in several packages and twm was only in a suggested
> package. I didn't find any reason to include thi old thing.
XF86Setup looks for twm before it will run, otherwise I wouldn't have
noticed or cared. Unfortunately, there is no dependency in XF86Setup to
that effect but Branden's latest XF86 packages aren't in slink yet, so I
didn't want to bother him.
Have fun,
Avery
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