What I found with initial installs
G'day All,
I posted a message on debian-user and said that there was some nasty bugs
in the initial installs but didn't say what they were. I thought I better
tell you about them. These bugs are quite embarrasing as I use Debian at
both work and home and have been trying to convince others at work to use
it, only to have problems, oh well.
What I did was simple enough, grabbed a PC connected to the Internet via
Ethernet, fed it the initial 5 disks. Then I told it to use the ftp method
and away we went.
But then it died, it doesn't like the version string for a program called
zlib, I think the version string was 1:.0-5 or something similar, notice
there is no number between : and . The solution is to manually edit this
file, which meant I ftped it onto our HPUX machine as I couldn't see how
you tell edit to go to a particular line. There are two such lines in the
/var/lib/dpkg/available file.
So we got that going, then another nasty. We wanted perl, which means you
delete perl-base as they conflict, we also wanted ldso for some dependancies
(which provides libdl). But perl predepends libdl and you can get in an
awful bind as almost everything wants perl. The solution here was to leave
everything in hold, get ldso and install and then run dselect again.
Here's a suggestion: to make things nicer, instead of saying
"perl predepends libdl" why cannot you say "you must install libdl before
you can install perl". It's a matter of changing one line, but don't you
think it is easier to understand. Yes I knew what it meant and so do
probably you, but the first-time user sitting next to me (and probably a lot
of other first time users) had no idea what it really meant.
Once again, who are we aiming Debian for; out target audience so to speak.
- Craig
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