Re: NFS install? (and other install problems)
On Thu, 19 Oct 1995, Ian Jackson wrote:
[...]
> > How come NFS is soooooo... much slower than FTP ??
>
> Because it was designed by Sun, who didn't think anyone would ever
> want to use it over anything but a nice fast big Ethernet. They were
> right - noone in their right might would want to use NFS over anything
> else, but that's because of the way they based it on UDP.
>
[...]
Actually, I installed debian into a notebook using a paralel cable with
the PLIP driver and it was reasonably fast. I NFS-mounted the directory tree
where I keep my debian packages and the installation was more or less smooth.
I only had a few problems:
1) After installing the base disks, I connected the paralel
cable so that I could run dselect in the notebook. However, since the
monitor in my desktop is easier to read than the LCD in the notebook, I
telnetted to the notebook. It took me almost 15 minutes until I
discovered that telnet was failing because it was commented out in the
config file. I just could not think such a choice would be the default.
2) In the initial installation dialog there is a question to let
the user choose between a monochrome or a color dialog. However there is
no indication (in words!!) telling you in which mode you are initially,
so if you use an LCD mono screen you have to choose at random and hope
for the best.
3) PLIP is not very slow, but it's slow compared to a local disk
or ethernet. For installation over slow links it is important to have an
estimate of how long it would take so that you can use that time for
something else (like going to a movie :-) ). At least there should be a
way to find the total amount of kbytes selected so that one can make some
calculations. That's important when disk space is limited. By the way,
what happens if dselect fills the disk before finishing, does it crash?
4) I got a seg fault while selecting packages. What I did is: I
installed a few packages. Then I selected a few more and installed. Then
I selcted a few more again and dselect crashed.
5) dselct is nice in a color monitor. However, in an LCD it is
just plain awful. Too may characters filling the screen with no clear
boundaries.
6) After installing to the notebook I run dselect in my desktop
so that I upgraded my desktop to the latest versions. Everything went
fine until I rebooted. Then a message saying that I was trying to boot an
unconfigured system and I needed the boot and root disks to start, then
go to expert mode and select "configure system". Whaaat? I configured my
system seven months ago and don't want to reconfigure it again.
Fortunately, I had those disks handy (but it was just good luck!!) and
could boot with them, go to the shell and remove /sbin/unconfigured.sh.
Not everybody who upgrades base.deb wants to reconfigure the system.
There should at least be warning telling you not to reinstall base.deb.
7) My friend was disappointed that X by default came with twm as
window manager and no menu for even opening an xterm. That's no good for
a dumb user.
I think that my friend does not trust me anymore. I told him that Debian
was easier and better than Slackware and convinced him to remove his old
Slackware and replace it with a brand new Debian, but after so many
glitches he got the idea that you really have to know a lot if you want
to install Debian. "However", he told me, " I was using Slackware for
more than a year and never had to edit a config file". He was referring
to system.twmrc; that file was really skinny.
What I regret most is that it was not difficult to install, it just
_looked_ difficult compared to Slackware.
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