d-i beta3 ramblings...
Hullo :)
This is the first time I've used d-i and I'm generally very impressed,
but I do have some moans, which I present here for your consumption.
I'm sure some of these will have been flagged before, so please let me
know the score - if some need to be officially lodged in bugs.d.o,
also let me know.
Bon appetit! :)
Installer before reboot:
The installer did not detect my network card. I have an old ISA
Plug-n-Play NE2000 compatible. When I selected "ne" from the driver
list, it was detected immediately without requiring any IO/IRQ settings.
I can understand if 'discover' simply doesn't support ISA any more -
it's been legacy for too long already. However, "ne" was not added
to /etc/modules, so on reboot I was unable to access the LAN until I
loaded the module and /etc/init.d/networking restart.
Base-config:
The "Set up users and passwords" writes two lines of similar text to the
whiptail window when asking for a normal-priv user. The exact texts are
something like "Please enter a name" and "Please enter the name".
Tasksel's 'Custom Kernel' package will install kernel-source-2.4.25,
when the installer has installed 2.4.26-386.
Tasksel is confusing to use. The Help text says that pressing ENTER or
SPACEBAR on a task will toggle the selection. This is not the case. If I
use the LEFT/RIGHT cursor keys to see "More Info" for a task, then
pressing ENTER or SPACEBAR will again invoke the 'More Info' function.
>From this point, the only way to again toggle tasks is to move the
cursor left or right until none of the three options are highlighted -
I'm an experienced sysadmin having done dozens of installs, and I find
this most confusing - I shudder to think how a new user would find it :)
I'll explain what I did, and what happened. I want KDE installed, but
not GNOME. I selected 'Desktop environment', and then pressed cursor
keys until I got 'More Info' selected - on seeing that it will install
GNOME, I wanted to remove my selection of 'Desktop environment', but I
managed to press LEFT, and then SPACE.
Rather than deselecting 'Desktop Environment' this pressed 'Finish' so
apt-get then immediately went to download 400MB of packages for X11, KDE
and GNOME. I pressed CTRL-C to stop it, and it gracefully exited and
returned me to the previous menu, where I selected only 'X Window
system' and then 'Finish'.
Unfortunately it had remembered the previous selection, and still wanted
to download KDE/GNOME/X11 :(
In fact, even after getting to the base-config menu, and pressing Cancel
to completely restart base-config, it still remembered all the GNOME/KDE
stuff I had now decided NOT to install.
I bypassed Tasksel, configured exim, finished base-config, and then
executed apt-get install x-window-system manually.
Cheers,
Gavin.
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