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debian, just what i always wanted.

First off, congratulations to the debian team.  They've produced an
excellent system.  I wish I had installed it when 0.93R5 was released...

I installed debian 0.93R6 for the first time a few days ago on a
secondary machine, and have been really blown away by how complete and
by how tightly integrated everything is, especially when compared to
Slackware.  

After examining, monitoring, and tweaking the system for a few days I've
decided that from now on, *ALL* linux systems that I install will be
Debian, and all currently installed linux machines which I maintain will
be gradually switched over to debian.



Maybe i'll find some as I become used to Debian, but Debian doesn't
appear to have the glaring holes and inconsistencies that Slackware
does.  You guys have really thought it out, and adhering to the Linux
FSSTND is a real bonus.

(actually, I may have found a minor one already...isn't /usr/bin/pppd
supposed to be setuid root?)



I was going to wait for 1.0, but when I heard that I could incrementally
upgrade from a.out 0.93R6 to ELF 1.0 when it's released I decided to
wait no longer...and am glad that I did.



The only problem I had with installing Debian is that I suspect that the
developers haven't done a full install from floppy onto a bare disk for
ages.  The installer had quite a few problems, mostly user interface
related. e.g. after selecting the option to make a boot disk from the
custom menu, there is no way to cancel that operation.  Not good if you
don't have a preformatted floppy available.  If an error occurs (i.e. no
disk in drive), the only option on the error dialog box is "OK" to try
again...there should be a "Cancel" there too!

Overall, I think that the install process is overly complicated, and
probably not suitable for first-time linuxers...which will probably
result in first-timers going to Slackware, even if it's buggy at least
it's simple to install.


Anyway, these are minor nitpickings.  The rest of debian more than
compensates.  

I've upgraded my main system several times now, starting with SLS 1.03,
then moving to Slackware.  I'm currently running a heavily patched and
fixed up Slackware 2.2 (the seriously broken release), and have put off
upgrading to 2.3 and 3.0 due to the hassles involved.  I'm going to have
to go through the same hassle when i install debian for the first time
on my main machine, but i'm really looking forward to the fact that this
will be the LAST TIME i ever have to do this again.  Hooray.  This is
what i've wanted for ages.  I should have switched to debian long ago.
Now I just have to reorganise the files on my disks to minimise the
hassle of switching to this truly superior linux distribution.

Once again, congratulations on a job well done! 



A couple of questions, though:

I haven't followed the debian developers mailing list...is there any
archive or log of what design decisions were taken and why?

For instance:

 - why use LDLINUX.SYS on the install boot disk instead of LILO?

 - why doesn't the install program ask you how you want to format the
   install drive?  I know you can shell out and fdisk/format it yourself
   manually (that's what I did).

 - why isn't there any Quick Install document, which gives in point
   form the steps required to create boot, root, and base disks under
   either dos or unix?  I'm sure that if I hadn't installed Slackware
   several times before and knew roughly what to do, I would have been
   lost and bewildered trying to work out what to do.

   (yes, I DO volunteer to write one if it doesn't already exist. if one
   does exist, then it should be more prominently located on the debian
   web pages)

 - why the need to copy all the *.deb files from the .../debian-0.93/binary/
   hierarchy into one big directory?  Why can't dselect automatically
   search in all subdirectories of .../binary/ for *.deb packages?

   Maybe there's an easier way to do it which I missed because of
   impatience with reading the docs over the web, but I had to
   'ln binary/Packages* binary/*/*.deb /tmp/debian' in order to install
   from the drive which I had mirrored debian to.



Craig

--
  cas@muffin.pronet.com                                cas@muffin.apana.org.au
   *       Unix Consulting:  Installation, Configuration, & Support.        *
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