installation report
Got a new machine and installed Debian (identified as 3.0r1).
Everything went fairly smoothly.
[Layout microflaw in "Choose the Language":
For German, "de-" should be "de -".]
[Got ext2 - no choice offered?]
But the package installation phase can be improved.
Installing a package means getting it, unpacking it, writing it
to disk, configuring it.
Package authors have the more or less justified assumption that
if one installs a package, one wants to use it.
However, this assumption is altogether false at the initial installation.
What packages do you want? All, of course. Hundreds of GB free disk space.
No time (or knowledge) to go through the list and select things.
What do I want? Everything installed on disk, nothing activated.
As long as a package is a collection of passive files sitting on disk
it does not harm me. It takes some space and I have space.
Nothing configured. No questions asked.
As it is, I cannot walk away from the installation, because
it insists on telling me lots of nonsense and waits for me to
hit Return or confirm OK.
- "xaw3dg is no longer a libXaw replacement"
But I do not want to know anything at all about xaw3dg.
- "apmd configuration files have moved"
- "statd uses tcpwrappers"
- "more information is available in /usr/share/doc/fetchmail/README.Debian"
- "kernel link failure info": edit arch/i386/vmlinux.ids and remove
'*(.text.exit)' from the 'DISCARD' line
Am I expected to take notes? The same holds for many packages.
Hundreds, thousands of packages are being installed.
It is a bug to come with any message at all at this stage.
Don't tell me about X_ttcidfont_conf or Ttf_xtt_wadalab_gothic
(or whatever it was).
Don't ask me half a dozen times what default spelling dictionary
I want to use.
One problem with the mistaken assumption that one is interested
in configuring a package is that the option "None" often is
missing. The console_cyrillic package insists that I tell it
whether I want Russian or Ukrainian or Byelorussian fonts on
my console. But I do not want any of those. It is impossible
to specify that.
Similarly, I do not want diald, I do not want wwwoffle, etc.
Stuff must be put on disk, either unconfigured, or configured
in a default way. Man pages must tell how configuration can be
done or modified. If the binary foo really needs configuration,
put the real binary in foo-unconfigured, and let foo be a wrapper
script that advises first to run <long path name>/foo-configure.
And then, when everything has been put on disk, and not a single
question was asked after the conversation "packages? - All",
the user has to select what to activate.
It is undesirable to run inappropriate services.
It is a security risk and takes time at boot and shutdown.
The number of daemons is really not very high, so the
installation script is allowed to, and indeed should, tell me
for each one what it is and does, and ask me whether I want it
activated. No, I do not need cannaserver, diald, postgres, innwatch.
Somewhat in this category is the question whether X is to be started.
(And the answer for me is No, this machine will be headless.)
This is an important question. I once lost a monitor to X, and
today I wondered whether I was going to lose the second one.
Strange loud noises and a chaotic screen looked very unhealthy.
So far about the installation.
At first sight all is working well. Have still to figure out
how to get ssh to do host-based authentication.
Andries
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