Another installation story
For what it's worth, here's my wife's experience
over the weekend. (She's in Austin, TX, I'm in
Seattle WA, making it hard for me to be a lot of
help, even if I weren't semi-clueless anyhow.)
From sandy@home.actlab.utexas.edu Mon Sep 30 23:46:58 1996
Subject: Re: Debian not suitable for beginners
Hi sweetie, forward this if it seems to help anything...
Spent another fruitless day trying to get a successful linux installation.
1) Red Hat. Red Hat proudly tells you that it will install directly
from its CDROM, but it only recognizes IDE CDROMs. My CDROM is SCSI. So
what happens is that DOS sees the CDROM just fine, starts the linux boot,
Red Hat loads its kernel which does NOT recognize my (generic Adaptec)
SCSI card, and bombs.
2) Red Hat II: Second Blood. Red Hat will also install from its own
boot-root floppies, which have SCSI drivers. However, the drivers are
broken. End of installation. Subsequent conversations with more
experienced Red Hat thrashers indicates that there's a lot more broken
than what I encountered.
Red Hat Conclusion: Back to the bookstore for refund.
3) Slackware. Brian downloaded slackware onto floppies from the net.
Slackware has a very nice package installer front end, but after
completing an excruciating 14-floppy marathon install and configuration,
Slackware did not recognize my (generic SMC) ethernet card. I couldn't
find any probes, drivers, further configuration instructions, or anything
else that might provide a clue.
Slackware conclusion: Erase and re-use the 14 floppies for something
worthwhile.
4) Debian. This was my biggest disappointment. I installed from the
image of the debian CDROM on Cynbe's 1.6G hard drive, which is
temporarily mounted in my machine. The minimal debian system I first
installed days ago found the ethernet card immediately. Then I made the
mistake of accepting the installer's suggested defaults for netmask,
gateway, etc. It turns out that debian does not calculate these defaults
correctly, so the system couldn't see any farther than the cisco router
down the hall. I couldn't find a config script that would let me change
the settings, so I changed the files in /etc/init.d as appropriate
instead. This broke the system irremediably. Since then the system
can't find the ethernet card, and any attempt to access the net causes
the system to print a slew of process names, all of which report "Network
unreachable". Attempts to reinstall debian are useless...the card
remains unfound, the network remains unreachable.
OK, here's the weird part. Even reformatting the root drive and doing a
fresh installation does not cause debian to find the card. The same
messages appear. *** And now they also appear when I attempt to
reinstall slackware.***
Checking the SMC card from DOS indicates that it's running properly and
configured OK. I can see the activity lights blinking, indicating that
the card is seeing traffic on the subnet.
The old debian boot floppy recognizes the card just fine, as always. But
once I boot from the hard drive the card's gone.
Now this is probably not much of a mystery to you guys. Obviously
there's a driver that's not getting installed or an installed one not
getting configured. But there isn't a clue in the install procedures as
to what I can do to go back and find, and install or configure, such a
driver. There's no provision in the install procedures for probing the
hardware to find the ethernet card, even though I know the system has the
capability to do so. In fact the install script doesn't even mention the
SMC card (it does mention 3Com), even though the boot floppy recognizes
it with no trouble.
There is a small possibility that the hard drive files from which I'm
installing are corrupted, but I'm kinda used to getting nice little
checksum messages when that happens. Maybe linux doesn't check data
integrity when it does disk reads, who knows. And that doesn't explain
why slackware has started giving the same errors.
Speaking as a relative novice to linux installs, I find myself completely
lost. First off, while I admit that the install programs must be working
for most people who use them and that I must be doing something wrong,
the package installers on both slackware and debian appear to me to be
insufficiently informative and frequently outright misleading. I agree
with what Ulrich von Bassewitz said about the debian front end in that
posting Cynbe forwarded to me. The behavior of dselect is unpredictable.
Things happen that you didn't know you'd asked for, and other things
happen that you didn't ask for at all. The debian "novice" setting is
helpful at first, but deadly if you have to install more than once --
unless you have all night, since there is no way to bypass its media
verification step; and with a 1.6G drive this takes nearly 30 minutes.
The expert setting seems to omit some critical configurations but sent me
back to the long, cumbersome net configuration sequence no less than
three times during the installation process.
If I'm going to depend on installer front ends, I think I'd expect
something a bit clearer than any of the packages I've mentioned. Like
Ulrich, I add that this is not meant to be debian bashing. But for those
of us who are more than novices but less than experts, getting linux up
and running is still a bloody mystery. I could most likely do it from
scratch in the old, pre-front-end style, but I simply don't have that
much time to mess around any more -- I have to teach, write, and perform;
I can no longer spend days and weeks happily hacking away at an operating
system until I understand it thoroughly down to the level of the code.
For now, I think linux still needs to be left to the experts.
So for now it's back to my Mac, sadder but wiser. It may be a black box,
but it gets the mail every time.
-Sandy
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com
Reply to: