Infomagic CD - Review of fresh install
Installation notes - debian 1.2 stable, as shipped on the
January InfoMagic Developer's Resource
Here are some observations and problems I found with attempting to
install Debian 1.2 from the latest Infomagic CD. I realise that some of
the problems listed here have been addressed already, but I haven't seen
anyone else post about problems with the CD specifically, so I thought I
would. Warning, this is quite long. Also, please don't take the
conclusions at the end as an invitation to a flame war. I wish I had
the time and the disk space to have helped test the release earlier
before it shipped, but I didn't.
First, someone needs to get Infomagic to add the install doc to the
booklet they ship with the CD. There are quick start instructions for
Slackware and Redhat but Debian is not even mentioned.
The first thing that struck me (and I know this is a common complaint)
was the number of disks it took. It's up one from the last time I
installed Debian over a year ago. ;(
Being a very cautious person when it comes to upgrades, though I had a
previously installed debian 1.?? system, (what ever the pre-release ELF
version was that was around last Xmas), I decided to do the new debian
install on a fresh disk. I wanted to see what a "from scratch" install
was like anyway, because I really like Debian's layout and had been
suggesting it to people over Redhat, and a few had complained that it
was too difficult to install. I prefer Debian because I like the choices
made in how the system is laid out, the arrangement of configuration
files, and the ease of upgrading (sometimes, more on this later)
Whenever I have installed a debian package, I've always been pleased
with the choices the maintainer made of where to put things, as they
usually fit my interpretation of the FSSND.
First, I think there could be a smaller install set designed. I don't
have a CD drive on the computer I installed on, it's on my other
computer and I export it over NFS. I would think that for situations
like this, or even an ftp install, you could pack enough on the boot
floppy and one other floppy which just stayed in the floppy drive to get
up and running. If I get time to play with the tools for making debian
boot kit's I may try to do this. (Is there a way to load more than one
floppy's worth of data into a ram disk without using multiple ram disks
like Redhat used to?)
On to the install, once the floppies were prepared. The initial floppy
install went well, the computer rebooted and then it was into dselect.
Much has been written on dselect, and I'm afraid I find a lot of it
true. It is confusing, non-intuitive, cluttered, and overly verbose. I
did not want to just select install everything, and with the way the
presentation was laid out, I found it frustrating to find the packages I
did want and ended up basically just installing the recommended
preselected stuff. (Note here: I think rather than one recommended
install set, a few would be a good idea. A workstation default, which
fits what dselect currently offers, a server default, which would leave
out TeX and other packages like that and a few sub-groups under these
might be a better option)
This went relatively smoothly, but again, dselect seems very slow as it
prints endless messages about how it is skipping unselected packages.
This seems to be the major problem I have with dselect, it bombards you
with information constantly, making it difficult to focus on which is
important and which can be ignored.
However, a more serious problem arose as it worked it's way through the
packages I selected. On the Infomagic CD, there are some duplicate
packages, with different version numbers and dselect would install the
newest then replace it with the older version. The packages I saw this
problem with included man, ppp, tcsh and xbase.
After the packages were installed, there were also some configuration
problems. TeX, part of the default install, would not configure
correctly because it couldn't find libXext. This was actually installed
but it appears that the post install routine didn't do an ldconfig, and
I don't think it put the path to the X11R6/lib directory in
/etc/ld.conf. X in general was a bit of a problem, because when you
configure it, after setting up the X server, the install program tells
you that Debian puts that XF86config file in /etc/X11, and asks if you'd
like to put it there. Then, when it tries to test the server, it fails
because it doesn't install a symlink somewhere where the server can find
the file. (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11?) And, if when the script asks you if the
server worked, you answer no, it exits and it is then impossible to
convince any package that X is installed. Not only that, there doesn't
appear to be any way to rerun the configuration to set this right. This
made trying to install any other X related packages a pain, because they
all claimed that the required X11R6 needed was missing.
Another problem was GCC. I selected both the regular gcc and the a-out
gcc, and somehow I ended up with a gcc binary version 2.7.2, but
everything else for gcc was 2.7.2.1. I copied gcc 2.7.2.1 over from my
other machine to fix that.
On a more minor note, Smartlist doesn't work if you install smail
instead of sendmail. It tries to run newaliases which smail installs in
lib/smail, which is not in your path. Smail should probably create a
symlink somewhere in the regular path.
In attempting to cure the unrecognised X11 problem and add some new
packages, I re-ran deselect several times, and every time it would
attempt to install everything again, and in the cases where it had
installed an older version of a newer due to duplicates on the CD, it
would install first the new one, then overwrite that with the older one
again. I had to manually set all the installed packages with = to get it
to stop doing that, and even then, as mentioned above, it had to look at
and report that it was skipping those packages. I think once a package
is installed dselect needs to mark it as not needing further attention
until it is asked to do an update scan, either via a new CD or an ftp
session, and finds a newer version.
Another problem I ran across was with tk/tcl. On the infomagic CD there
are tk versions 40, 41 and 42, and tcl versions 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6, and the
interdependencies between them are very confusing. This was compounded
by tcl not wanting to install because it didn't believe X was installed.
Finally, still with a system with a bunch of broken packages, I pointed
dselect at the ftp option. After scanning the ftp site, dselect came
back with a list of packages that were upgrades to packages that I had
installed. This part I like!!. Many of the packages that were available
as updates fixed the multiple version problems I was having, so I
suppose that people are aware of the problems with the original stable
release.
Another place where dselect showed it's propensity for unneeded messages
was when I went to download these updated packages. Dselect checks the
sizes of the packages and the amount of disk space you have, and then
rather than do the math itself, presents you with a warning screen
showing you the total download size and the amount of disk space and
asking if it's ok to download the files, even though there was 10X more
disk space available than was needed. This highlights, to, me a major
problem with dselect. It doesn't differentiate between errors, warnings,
suggestions and inquiries. They are all presented in exactly the same
format.
As there was a new xbase on the ftp site, I finally managed to get a
second chance at configuring X, and this time I lied and told it that
the X server had worked when it didn't. This got X at least marked as
installed, which allowed me to fix a lot of broken packages finally and
go on to final setup and running the system. This is where, IMO, parts
of Debian really shine. Highlights are the smail, named and inn
configuration. All the packages install pretty reasonable config files
and examples. I mounted my /local drive on /usr/local and was able to
get all my locally customised stuff up and integrated quite easily into
the new system and everything seemed to run fine, but I hit one show
stopper (for me, but if someone's planning to use Debian as a base for a
dial up server, watch out)
Something is broken about PPP in the current setup, as of the latest
packages on Jan 4 on the ftp site. My old setup, which as I mentioned
was built on a Debian base from last year, mostly upgraded by hand with
some debian but mostly non-debian packages, up to libc 5.4.17, kernel
2.0.27, and ppp 2.2.0f, basically the same packages in the latest
debian, is set up as a dial up ppp server using mgetty's PAP
recognition, and works fine. I have a Cyclom board that the modem's are
connected to. So, after getting everything set up, and copying in my
mgetty and ppp config files, one of my friends tried to dial in. As soon
as a ppp connection was made, I started getting kernel panics. Even at
high levels of debugging, I couldn't figure out why. To try to figure
out what was going wrong, I first installed my own copy of ppp2.2.0f,
then tried recompiling the kernel. (that's when I discovered the
mismatch between gcc and the rest of the installed compiler) Then I
recompiled ppp from scratch. That didn't work either, so at that point,
I rebooted from my other disk and, of course, ppp worked fine again. I
don't know if there's a bug in libc-5.4.13, but that's the only thing I
didn't try updating. At that point I just felt it was no longer worth
the effort, and scrubbed the disk.
My conclusion is that I can't currently recommend to people who ask me
that they should go with Debian except possibly for those who want to do
a minimal install and then use that as a base to build their own system
by hand, which is my usual method. At least the version on the Infomagic
CD set is barely installable, and dselect still needs a lot of work to
become really usable for a new installation.
I think the interface to dselect needs some serious redesign. As I
mentioned earlier, there currently is no differentiation between errors,
warning, and suggestions. The various layout choices you get from the o
key all leave you with choices that are quite complicated.
My suggestion would be to have dselect work like a folding editor, so
the initial presentation was quite compact. Then, by opening various
categories of choices, more and more information is presented to you. As
well, the selection screen should take up at least 2/3 and possible 3/4
of the the screen real estate, not the mere 50% it does now. This would
allow you to at least see a bit more of the selection. As well, I think
it's really annoying that it shows you a help screen every time it
switches to a new mode. The first time is fine, but every time is
annoying.
Other problems with dselect appear to be bugs, like it's failure to mark
installed packages as installed and it's installing of older packages
over newer ones when both exist on a CD.
--
John Henders - System Administrator - Mindlink!/Wimsey
--
John Henders - System Administrator - Mindlink!/Wimsey
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