Re: Floppy X
On Thu, 18 Apr 1996, J wrote:
> Mark Eichin wrote:
> > Note that if we want small, and we've already got perl, we can drop
> > xrdb, since I've got a minimal perl Xlib (raw perl, no libraries) that
> > can do an xrdb directly. Then again, we can drop xrdb anyway --
> > anything local can read ~/.Xresources, and if you've got remote
> > clients, then you can install xrdb from the net too.
>
> Yes, perl can be dropped unless any installation uses perl script.
> Perl binary alone takes around 900k in my SGI.
That's not what he was saying. perl can't be dropped because it is used
by lots of installation scripts. He was saying that xrdb could be dropped
and replaced with a perl program built around a perl version of Xlib.
> > However, this is just for a *minimal* installation. You'd really want
> > to install a *real* X installation (from CDROM of course - you can get
> > CDROM drives as low as $80 these days[2].)
>
> Yesterday I got a CD rom drive (paid 45 pounds roughly 70 dollars) and
> a freshly burnt CD of Debian. I spent 3 or 4 hours in the
> night only finding that the CD is somewhat wrongly recorded.
> I also lost my WinNT and Win95(I am sure I can recover these though with
> extra hours).
The CD was correct, as you now know.
> Now I feel really frustrated. As I have pointed out there are always
> unexpected things like CD burner has errors or the written CD is
> not correct etc. Or even buggy distribution can be uploaded to
> a mass production line(as I heard on Debian). It is full of
> errors. If you are a progrmmer, you will know how unpredictable in
> computing and programming. It is always important to have all sorts
> of possibilities.
Are you talking about the currently released version of Debian, 0.93R6,
or the development ('unstable') version? If you're talking about the
unstable version, then I think your point is not terribly well made - the
'unstable' version is not yet finished, and you should expect problems.
The fact that there are many people using it without problems is not
really relevant.
> If I were just a computer user who wanted to use Linux for some application
> purposes, I am sure I have backed off by now, saying Linux is a crap
> exaggerating the frustration.
I think quite a lot of your problems are brought about by your situation
- using floppies to transfer a complete Unix system is not the ideal way
to do things. Now that you have a CD-ROM drive and a CD copy of the
Debian ftp site, hopefully you will have far fewer problems. I don't know
what peculiarity of your system made it mount the CD ignoring the Rock
Ridge extensions - if you mount the CD manually then hopefully it will work.
> I do not know people who develop Debian distribution are using
> single or a few text terminal for their programs, but without
> any basic graphical env(X), I can not or rather would not
> develop any codes. It is not fun.
That paragraph doesn't parse very well. Are you trying to say that you
believe Debian developers are using text-only systems for their
development, or the opposite?
> I really feel the very basic X where you can load multiple windows is
> a must.
> No other distribution has organized disks in that way and Debian
> can be better if it can support X base disks IMHO.
Yes, I think X is very useful too. I don't think that it's necessary to
have the whole installation run under X, right from the time you boot the
base system. When you have all the packages in one place, installing X is
very easy. You can then, if you like, run dselect and dpkg and so on in
an xterm.
There would be problems, of course, with upgrading X while running it.
Steve Early
sde1000@cam.ac.uk
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