Re: unhappy customer
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 03:58, Hubert Chan wrote:
> >>>>> "Billie" == Billie Mulcahy <eubillie@lycos.com> writes:
>
> Billie> Debian is hard to install. ...
>
> Could you tell us what you found hard about the install?
>
> Personally, I have never found it hard to install. The only thing I
> found was that you had to know what hardware you had, to pick out the
> right modules if they were needed. (Hopefully this will be better with
> the hardware autodetect in the new d-i.) But then again, I had
> installed SLS from a huge stack of floppies back in the day.
>
> So I am wondering what exactly it is that people find hard about the
> Debian installer.
Speaking from limited experience. The graphical configurator xf86cfg that is
used in Woody is such a useless heap of shit that I suspect that it must have
been donated by Microsoft. By useless heap of shit I mean that it actually
does nothing, you can move from button to button to invoke some action but
nothing at all happens.
There was a graphics config program in Potato that was a bit painful but it
did at least work though I do not recall the name of it. FWIW program with
the same interface is used in Slackware to this day.
It's not hard to work around the useless thing. xf86config is a text based
configurer that generates a XF86Config file that will need to be renamed
afterward to XF86Config-4 if using XFree86 version 4.1 the default for Woody.
I found that worked with nvidia chipsets using the nv driver.
For S3Trio chipsets that often turn up on older hardware, it is necessary to
install the xserver-s3 package because the vesa driver is broken for S3Trio
in XFree86 version 4.1 .
Apart from that, many things work better in Debian than other distros.
pppconfig for one thing is much better than the KPPP in Fedora for just one
example.
Just my 2 bits
Bob Parker
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