Critical points concerning the current Debian Sid installer
Hi,
I tested the Debian Sid Installer from January 25th.
It's close to perfection, it is really good and usable.
Here are the critical points I am missing:
1. At the end of the first gothrough you are asked whether you want UTC
or local time. Knowing that UTC is the standard switch I always chose
local time.
The result of this choice is - pardon me - rubbish in purity:
When the system starts into its second gothrough you need to repair the
ext3 filesystem manually because the time stamp of the superblock(s)
differ from the real clock.
2. In the latest kernel release (i. e. 2.6.33-rc5) the usage of the old
IDE drivers is not encouraged, and they are declared as obsolete /
deprecated. However, the current installer of the "unstable" development
line does not pay any respect to that fact - it simply ignores it.
The question is: Why please?
Me personally I have found out that it is no problem to mark drivers
like "ide-core" or "piix" or "ide-gd" as blacklisted and thus prevent
the fuc... udev from loading them.
BUT:
How can I force udev to load "ata-piix" for instance?
I've tried several methods to do that - in vain. What did I do wrong
please?
Especially an installer of an "unstable" development line should at
least contain an option to load these newer and better maintained
drivers for "old" parallel ATA disks and DVDs or other devices.
"Unstable" should conform to acknowledging latest development issues.
It should NOT conform to "conservative 0815 mainstream" at all.
I do not understand why this is still not the case, because I am quite
sure that the traditional IDE drivers will disappear quite soon.
3. In the first two gothroughs I normally perform a minimum adequate
core installation. When this is done, I edit etc/apt/sources.list to my
personal needs. And after performing "apt-get update" plus "apt-get
upgrade" I enter "apt-get install gnome".
If you go that way there is no pitfall and everything is running fine so
far:
The downloaded packages are buffered in the var-Partition, and the
minimum requirement of the var-Partition is about 1.2 Gigabytes of hard
disk space.
BUT:
There is also the option to make "apt-get install gnome" a graphical
part of the first and second gothrough, graphically.
During my first try the size of the var-Partition was 1.3 Gigabytes.
During my second try it was 2 Gigabytes.
After waiting for about 20 minutes I got back a system message that the
installer cannot write to disk anymore because of lack disk space.
My question is: If I chose "graphical desktop environment" as default
installer option, where the hell does this black-boxed installer buffer
this huge mass of downloaded Debian packages?
This is a real crude bug, isn't it? It's obvious that it cannot be the
var-Partition, proven by facts.
So where is the pitfall if I go the default path?
If you manage to really fix these 3 points I would call this installer a
real good one.
Best regards
CS
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