Re: installation report
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> 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?]
The default kernel for Debian 3.0 (aka woody) is Linux 2.2, but if you
type "bf24" at the initial boot prompt, then a special version of
Linux 2.4 will be used instead and you will be able to use ext3 or
reiserfs.
> 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.
That's not exactly how Debian is supposed to work, but there are ways
to circumvent the unwanted questions.
> 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.
In the old days, every package asked questions in different ways.
This is now being standarized around "debconf". It is already debian
policy that packages should use debconf to interact with the user, so
if you find a package in unstable which do not use debconf to ask
questions, that would be a bug.
One of the goals for debconf is to allow non-interactive installs.
I would suggest
apt-get install debconf debconf-doc
dpkg-reconfigure debconf
for a start.
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