problems installing Debian 2.0 "Scientific Workstation"
Yesterday I helped a colleague and new Linux user install Debian 2.0
(taken from a local mirror that should have been up-to-date). She chose
the "Scientific Workstation" option, which meant that a great many
packages were installed at once. Perhaps this is why we ran into problems.
We encountered a few minor problems and two major ones during the dselect
phase of the installation.
1. On at least two occasions during the installation of packages,
something seemed to go into an infinite loop, spewing the message "expr:
syntax error" on the screen. The only way I could figure out how to stop
it was to switch to another console, find out what process was using CPU
time, and kill it (it needed kill -9, as I recall). The installation
process then proceeded. Two packages that were definitely affected were
the vga16 and s3 X servers, neither of which were needed anyway (although
vga16 would have been necessary if we had needed to use XF86Setup;
luckily, we did not). I believe there was also one "expr: syntax error"
message when we were installing the Mach64 server (which is the one that
we used).
2. I was unable to install emacs, and packages that depend on it,
successfully. I tried numerous times, removing emacs20 and other things,
then reinstalling. I always ended up with emacs20 installed but only
half-configured. Also, auctex would not install because it said it wanted
emacs19.
There were many messages during the attempts to configure emacs. They
typically ended with something like
> emacs-install: /usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/install/tm emacs20
> xemacs20 failed at /usr/lib/emacsen-common/emacs-install line 26.
> dpkg: error processing emacs20 (--install):
> subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 29
> Errors were encountered while processing:
> emacs20
> DPKG ERROR
For the most part, the install went well. I hope that my colleague will be
happy with her system. I am impressed, not to say overwhelmed, by how many
packages Debian 2.0 contains.
James G. MacKinnon Department of Economics
phone: 613 545-2293 Queen's University
Fax: 613 545-2257 Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Email: jgm@qed.econ.queensu.ca K7L 3N6
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