dSELECT
Ill start this off with the usual caveats, Im new to linux in general,
as well as debian. My problems, however, seem to be with the dselect
program. I have read the minimal help pages within dselect, as well
as the linux install faqs and the (frankly next-to-useless) dselect
beginner file. I also checked the debian-user archives, and while I found
a lot
of problems with dselect, none of the solutions fixed mine.
The system Im using: (Im pretty sure this is irrelevent)-
TI TM6020 notebook, P120, 8 Mgs, Active Color,...
I installed the base off of dos disks and everything went very, very
smoothly (For some reason, I thought that was going to be the
hard part, guess not).
As for the packages, I decided that it would be easiest for me to d/l
the important stuff, or at least as much as I could, and install from a
zip disk. I didnt have a problem getting dselect to read the zip disks
nor the packages contained therein. In fact, many of the packages
installed
smoothly. Some of them, however, did not. Most of my problems were with
xwindows files, Ill try to boil this down to some questions.
1. When installing I got pre-dependency and other dependency errors...
shouldnt dselect have told me about these _before_ it started installing?
This isnt exactly intuitive (nor is it in any help files Ive seen). Before
you
respond with the obvious, yes, all of the files which I had selected,
were, in
fact, on the zip disk. Why isnt dselect showing ALL the dependencies?
2.The files that wouldnt install were man manpages groff as well
as a host of x files including xbase (kinda important) and all the
servers.
Whats worse, when I went in and tried to remove all these broken files,
dselect got rid of most, but for the x servers was giving me the message
xserver-svga is in an extremely inconsistent state -- you should reinstall
before removing.
Well, thats some circular logic worthy of Microsoft, I need to reinstall
the package I cant install so I can remove it?
3. The main hang up for dselect seemed to be configuration files
of one sort or another, it failed, for some reason, to create the config
files for x, which lead to a whole host of other errors, and eventually
to the installation process being halted.
____________________________________
My apologies for not providing more specific information, if
there isnt any easy answer to my problems (which Im guessing
is the case), can anyone at least recommend/point me to a file
which sorts packages in a more sensible order? (The required/
imortant/optional/extra is sort of vague). In other words, if you
want a basic xwindows system these packages are vital... these
may be needed... these are nice to have... _and_, more importantly
has the actual dependencies of the packages and what order (if any)
they need to be installed in?
Thanks for any help/advice/pointers. I know its frustrating dealing
with newbies, just remember its frustrating being one too.
_Peter
D
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