Netinst feedback
All,
After using RedHat for several years, I'm finally fed up with their
chronic ignoring of bug-reports from non-enterprise customers and the
recent moves torwards per-seat licensing were the last straw...
I won't dwell upon what a horror my first Debian experience (woody) was,
you've all heard it enough to motivate the new installer. Which is why
I'm writing this.
I screwed up my courage to take another chance at Debian, using the new
netinst CD. This is definitely a good step forward, but there are some
issues I wanted to report. Until I get comfortable with it, I begin by
bringing up a new distro as a VMware guest running under a RedHat 8.0 host
and all comments below are relative that environment. I opted for the
'test' (sarge) installation, since woody is hopelessly backlevel for
almost anything I'd need to run:
o Even though I had specified a small /boot partition during disk
partitioning, Grub was incorrectly setting root to (hd1,1), which is my /
partition. Edited command line from grub startup, then fixed
/boot/grub/menu.lst accordingly.
o The installer created /usr/X11R6/bin with 0700 permissions, which neatly
prevented a non-root user from running anything X-related. Took quite a
while to figure out what was going on. A simple chmod fixed it.
o The base system does not probe for IDE devices, rendering the VMware
CD-ROM device inaccessible. I had to manually modprobe ide-detect after
booting. I'm unfamiliar with module configuration under Debian, so I'm
not sure where to request that this be loaded on a persistent basis.
o User KDE session cannot produce sound unless permissions for
/dev/sequencer and /dev/dsp are changed to 0777. This also begs the
question of why a GNU/Debian installer chooses KDE as the default (I
didn't ask for it, and expected Gnome).
o The default X display driver for VMware guests cannot properly render
antialiased fonts, e.g. the main menubar popup shows all entries blank
until the mouse is moved over them. Installing the latest VMware X driver
from the VMware tools package fixed this, although their installation
script hosed X completely until I renamed the original (which VMware
modifies to XF86Config-4.BeforeVmware) back to XF86Config-4. This is
certainly not a Debian issue, but it would be helpful to include a current
display driver by default.
o Line drawing characters do not seem available to 'mc' when run in
konsole. Works fine from an xterm or rxvt window. I've never seem this
in other KDE environments.
I poked at the Debian bug report system, but couldn't fathom how or where
to enter this feedback. Hopefully, sending it to this list is not too out
of line.
Steve
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