Re: dSELECT

[Rick Jones <rickya@siservices.net>]

On Thu, 15 May 1997, Peter Ginsberg wrote:

> 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.

dselect will do the down loading for you.  Which would be the easiest way
to insure that what is needed is actually retrieved instead of ftping
files by hand and using dselect to install from local hard drive.

You will undoubtedly hear suggestion for using dpkg with a bunch of
(probably varying) arg's to acomplish this.  Some people run into one
problem as you have and go to the command line use od dpkg to solve thier
problems.  Sometimes that is needed.  It isn't in your case.  

All but the strange error about the xserver are common.  All you have to
do is go through the install process more than once.  It will install
things gradually until everything is installed.  Takes maybe 2 extra
rounds in install.

Why anybody would think it best to tell a new comer to resort to command
line use is beyond me.  That opens a whole new can of worms.  I wish you
people would answer a dselect question with a dselect answer not a dpkg
answer unless that is the only alternative.

If a person is familiar enough with linux to run dpkg with args to
acomplish what dselect does anyway.  They are good enough to look in the
man pages and doc's on dselect and that would lead them to dpkg which they
could read up on and get it done on their own.  If that's the way they
want to do it.  By telling a person to use dpkg you are just saying that
"I don't know how to do that with dselect, you should be using dpkg
anyway, come over to the dark side Luke, use dpkg..."  The person is
asking about dselect, not dpkg.

If I ask a sendmail question on the list I don't expect a "use smail and
do this..." answer unless that is the only way to get it done.


--Rick

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