experiences: installing new testing system from network
Hello,
Today, I installed Debian on a friends computer (so, sorry, but I
can't test any solutions).
this went mostly to plan, however several minor problems:
- selecting "configure device drivers" (or what ever) did nothing, so
I had to configure the network driver for the Intel Etherexpress 100
manually.
- debootstrap kept aborting with unidentified errors with
ftp.monash.edu.au, ftp.au.debian.org, ftp.us.debian.org, but went OK
for ftp.debian.org (sometimes, but not always, I saw file not found
errors on the 3rd or 4th console); I think it needs to be able to
recover better from errors, and more information on what went wrong
would be good, too... It is possible to continue installing, if
debootstrap won't work?
- on reboot, as I manually configured the eth0 driver, I had to redo
it again here, and put the result in /etc/modules.
- I selected to use the Australian download (ftp.monash.edu.au) site,
but it didn't use the Australian mirror of non-us.debian.org (which is
stored on the same server).
- selecting install X desktop environment did not install stuff I
considered very important, eg. a window manager. So I installed
sawfish-gnome manually.
- I found it difficult to locate information for the video card in
question - a Matrox G450. Apparently, it is not supported by X 4.0.3
out of the box, and the driver needs to be downloaded from the
manufacturers website (let me guess: this is probably a closed source
driver...) I think it should be clearly documented in the
documentation of xserver-xfree86 what to do in cases like this.
Everything else went exactly to plan.
Anyway, just my feedback, I hope you can use it to make Debian even
better!
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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