Bug#2539: Debian Unstable Experiences
I want to relate some of the experiences I had installing Debian
unstable this week. I realize that it is clearly labelled as not ready
for "prime time", but I am not a novice user (just lazy about keeping my
system current).
I did manage to install the system and get it running (and compiling),
but there were a number of "gotcha's" you should be aware of.
I started off with the three basic disks. Actually, I had hoped to be
able to install even the base system, first time, off a hard drive
partition, and was surprised that I was unable to. Especially since I
had already nuked my old system (I had to partially install from my old
slackware and dd the base disks). There was no indication of how one
might create the boot/root and base disks in the docs. I could use
rawrite for the boot/root disks, since they compressed to a size that
would fit on a floppy, but I could not do that with the base disks,
since they would not compress. Some indication of how to use dd to
create them would spare some angst.
Then, I created a boot floppy -- out of sequence, before I had
configured the system. I know, RTFM. But it seemed to really hose
things. I re-booted with it, after I had configured the base system,
and wound up on square one, but with a difference. I couldn't get to
the hard drive to complete the install, and I couldn't start over since
it seemed to think the floppy was my / partition. The mount table stuff
was really messed up, and got worse.
I might have been able to fix my mistake if I had any control over the
system through the shell prompt. You should include a (static) ls in
the system that loads into the ramdisk, plus a few other utilities.
In order to even start over, I had to do rm -rf * on / (fortunately I
was able to, but it was not clear, from the hosed mount table, whether
other partitions, like the one with the full system on it, were also
removed. They were not.)
Then I managed to get to the dselect....
I know you are trying to do the right thing with this conflict-avoidance
stuff, but you ahve to be very careful about what requires what, and
what conflicts with what. many packages _require_ cpp, and won't agree
eaasily to installation without it. But gcc-2.7.2 said it conflicted
with cpp, and would not let me install it, too.
I am still not sure whether cpp should have been installed. I did so,
and it seems to work, though I gather that gcc -E will now do the
pre-compiling. I don't really know what all gets called when compiling,
yet. Perhaps because of this gcc/cpp difficulty, cc1 did not get linked
to my path (doing so let things compile, so I guess that's OK.
There were a number of packages with false (I think) conflicts. One
pair, I forget which, had one _requiring_ the other, and the other
conflicting with the first one. I installed both and think that was OK.
Sorry I don't know which ones. The conclict-avoidance screens kept
shifing back and forth, and it was rather confusing after a while.
I had to go through the full list several times to get the list of
packages I wanted. This is not a bad thing, since I had the options I
needed. But it was annoying.
Then came the first crack at installing. This failed miserably, since
one of the first things installed must have been the new clib, but it
was not done correctly, ldconfig was not run. Then, all the other new
packages could not be configured, since all the programs to do that were
looking for a clib that was not in ldconfig's memory. Had I not known
about doing that, I would have been completely hosed.
I found I had to install several times. I was surprised to see some
things desected that I am sure I did select. I believe these things
were auto-changed by the conflict-avoidance, and I missed that.
Some packages did not work at all. ghostscript would not install
because I had a wrong library (probably the vga graphics), but there
were other things that said they needed that lib, or others depending on
it, in a swirl of conflicts. I had a copy (a.out -- but, then, so was
this) saved, so I will survive that. Netscape seemed to be a bad
archive, and would not install at all. Also, the netstd package caused
a signal 11 from gzip, each time, but I think most of it installed
correctly. It did not configure correctly, though, at least not
completely. I got that package twice, and had the same experience both
times.
Then I forgot to re-make my boot-disk (I was tired). Start over. Same
problems.
There were two different packages that were listed twice (each), with
different versions. One was the keyboard package. They kept installing
on top of each other. I think the other one was the netstd package, but
that might have been a result of the partial failure of that one to
unpack. It created another version of it, I think.
There are two listed XF86-W32 servers (one leaves out the word "server",
and adds W32/et4000, but that is dummy). Only one works, and it has
problems. The 3.1.2D version fixes those problems, though.
When this fun was over, the kernel I got was strangely configured. The
modules didn't get correctly loaded, some were complaining about being
malformed. And it didn't even have msdos filesystem support (???) so I
could not mount a dos floppy. I did re-build, of course, and it worked
well enough to get me that far, which is all I care about.
On the plus side, there were many fewer permissions problems than
slackware had for me (last install was 2.2). The compiler and includes
were for the most part correctly configured, except (a big except) that
the xmkmf script added the flag -b elflinux (I think), and so it
blythely ignored all libraries. Programs all segfaulted unless they
were compiled -g, with a -share added, since it looked for a static
libgcc which it could not find.
TeX seems to work (though it is old -- I'll look for the new one). At
least debian gives an easy method to upgrade packages!
Believe it or not, I think debian is the way to go for me. The ability
to select each program, rather than whole chunks, is very important, as
is the ability to re-do installation pieces that don't work.
The interface is certainly less polished than RedHat is supposed to be,
but that doesn't matter.
The last time I installed slackware the imake scrips were completely
useless. This was not the case with debian.
I hope these comments help your effort.
--
David L. Johnson dlj0@lehigh.edu, dlj0@netaxs.com
Department of Mathematics http://www.lehigh.edu/~dlj0/dlj0.html
Lehigh University
14 E. Packer Avenue (610) 758-3759
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3174 (610) 828-3708
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