installation report of hamm 26.4.
ok, i tried to install from cdrom.
cd1 containes : main
cd2 containes : contrib, non-US, non-free (and other stuff)
a) my cd contained only frozen. but dselect want's stable ...
b) some problem with perl : dselect->install did not work.
i helped myself with "dpkg -iGROEB /cdrom"
c) gpm has a strange -l setting. reading the manpage, i guess
its for german charsets. if this is the case, i wonder
why such things are not handled with LC_ codes...
d) i had problems with the keyboard - i'm sure i selected german
(de-latin1-nodeadkeys) but it didn't work right.
later i executed kbdconfig again, and this helped.
e) apache - is this interactive configuration realy necessary ?
what about providing a save default, and allow a sysadmin to
change this later with apacheconfig ? maybe some only wants to
access his /doc tree, dhtml etc.
f) xserver offered my to "configure now". this failed, because not everything
was installed, so it could not work.
g) cvs is in default ! no ! most people don't use it, and it contains a
server, that has to be configured. this is work, and for people who
don't know cvs its very confuseing.
h) xbase: some files were already there, but empty (Xserver). maybe this has
todo with f). many people had problems with bo, when /etc/init.d/xdm
did exist, but was empty, and they did not press "I" to replace it.
now the same thing again ?
i) pcmcia ? this machine doesn't need it, so no reason to install it.
j) mail server in the default set ? i think this is obsolete.
most people begin with x11 and netscape, and everything else comes
later.
h) xserver installation. the user needs your help !
i didn't know, what xserver i need, so i installed only vga16,
so XF86Setup will tell me more. result : fatal.
the first time it failed because mach64 server was not installed.
this will confuse users !
i suggest to do an appropiate "echo xserver-<server>|dpkg
--set-selection" call, save the default config, and ask the user
to run dpkg again and continue later.
ok, so i had to care about this myself, and started xf86setup later again,
doing the whole configuration again... this time i got :
missing close-brace
("if" then script line 1)
while compiling
"if {![getline]} { ..."
(file "/ ... /phase5.tcl" line 26)
invoked within "source /.../phase5.tcl"
XF86Config was written, but Xserver was not modified.
xdm-start-server was not listed in /etc/X11/config.
calling xbase-configure did not help. this script should assist the user in
such stuff, because the debian way to do these things is only known to some
hackers.
ok, at least xbase-configure changed the xdm/Xserver file, after i added
the "xdm-start-server" line.
btw: this seems to be redundant information to me.
i) i made a mistike with the non-free directory on my cd.
what is the right way to create packages files ?
several packages were without description. ihoped running dpkg-scanpackages
would be enough. but it isn't. i also installed it in the wrong directory
(non-free, not non-free/Packages).
so i found out : dselect isn't very helpy, if you don't know the exact path.
and how can i get dselect to handle non-US ? ok, i used the local/ path for
that, because i had no local directory.
is something planed, how can dselect work with data on several files ?
in the end i copied both cdroms to the hard disk, because i found no
other solution. dselect could also be a bit smarter at guessing paths.
j) ssh waits for a return, without a visible reason.
k) afterstep waits with an unnecessary message - that message is only usefull,
if you update from "< 1.4" to 1.4 or higher, but not for new
installations.
l) network configuration : i selected "no network".
i suggest to create a dummy network device. that's a much smarter
setup, than aliasing the hostname to 127.0.0.1, which can create
problems IIRC.
j) afterstep crashed creating it's configuartion files. seems like it has
problems with 24bpp, the 8bpp and 16bpp files were created before
crashing
l) lilo configuration still does not detect msdos hrddisks, and create
a default configuration, so you can boot lilo and dos.
i'm sure one o the other distributions wrote a program to do this,
so if it's gpl'ed, debian only needs to take their code.
m) i installed the fvwm2 windowmanager. this wm can make realy noce looking
windows, but the default setup is more than ugly.
a linux newbie will runaway ...
n) the dpkg manpage : look at the -G parameter. isn't something missing ?
later i had some trouble with win*95 destroying the linux / partition.
only one directory inode was deleted, but this dir was /var/lib/dpkg/info ...
linux did not booted, and when repairing from the boot cdrom, i got :
no room in lost+found directory.
expand <y> ? y
segmentation fault.
ok, that's all for now. i hope that someone in debian will read this mail,
and care about these problems. a new user will fail with such problems.
andreas
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