Re: Debian Installation experience
On Sun, 6 Jul 1997, Alexander Kjeldaas wrote:
>
> I installed debian a few weeks ago and I noticed that when an installation
> disk is corrupted you have to start the installation all over again. If I
> remember correctly there were 7 diskettes.
Your memory is partially correct. Debian requires a _maximum_ of 8 disk,
but as few as 0.
Option 1: cd install from bootable cd, 0 disk
Option 2: loadlin install, 0 disk
Option 3: resc and drivers on floppies, base1_3 on harddrive, 2 disk
( may require root on floppy if you only have a 5 1/4 )
Option 4: everything on floppy, between 7 and 8 disk
> What about giving the user a second
> chance when a read-error is encountered?
You do, it's called the reboot key :-) That's only if the root fails,
I'm pretty sure you get a second chance with the base disk, not positive
about the drivers disk.
> Also I have trouble understanding what all those diskettes are for. My
> installation takes 36MB. subtracting /usr/{doc,man,info,X11R6} and
> /var/log leaves 18.5MB. 7 diskettes can hold 7*1.44MB = 10MB. When I use
> gzip -9 to compress my 18.5 MB distribution it's down to 7MB! Less than
> the size of my installation disk and it fits on _5_ diskettes. You get
> _tons_ of programs in 18MB.
The base disk total 5819Kb at the current time, they are designed to fit
on both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 floppies, most likely to save space on the
mirrors. The base1_3.tgz is a simple tar archive if you want to see
what's on the base disk.
> I installed using ftp. When deb-ftp gets packets it doesn't indicate where
> in the process it is. No estimated time is given - no "remaining packets"
> is given.
It would be a nice feature, but the debian programmers are currently busy
overhauling the dselect program, this just has to be left as a low
priority at the present time. You can always look at the file size change
as it comes in.
> [ It would be preferable to be able to check packets as they are
> fetched - not as a second step wasting lots of time. Having several
> ftp-sessions for speed would also be a plus. ]
I don't see the advantage of several ftp sessions. Even if there was an
advantage, everyone else would do this, and you wouldn't be able to
connect to your mirror because it's reached the max connection level.
> I think the fact that the debian installation requires 7 diskettes as
> opposed to redhat which requires two (three?) and the seemlingly(?) slow
> ftp-installation makes a debian-installation _almost_ an order of
> magintude slower/more frustrating to install than redhat.
See above comment on # of disk. If speed is a problem, cd's run for less
than 3 dollars.
> Is there any help on getting X installed at all? I'm not sure that it
> appeared as part of the installation process. I searched around in dselect
> and by chance found the xbase package.
Did you look at the section headings, there are entire sections devoted to
X, split up by recommented, optional, and extra divisions. (See above
note on dselect overhauling.)
> while undocumented, both dpkg and dpkg-ftp depends on gcc
> (dpkg-ftp uses dpkg --print-architecture which uses gcc)
> while undocumented, dpkg depends on perl
> ( dselect disk installation requires perl)
I'll have to double check this (didn't have the phone number of my isp
handly while testing the install disk), but I think the base install has
enough to start ppp using the pon and poff scripts and use the ftp method
of dselect to finish the installation. I'm guessing perl was included
with the base disk.
[remaining comments cut]
I'm not going to try to get you to use debian over red hat, just like I
don't try to get my mom to use linux over win 95. The fact that you are
using linux and that she is using a computer is good enough. Of course,
whenever she has a problem, I just smile, blame windoze, and walk away.
Brandon
-----
Brandon Mitchell E-mail: bhmit1@mail.wm.edu
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/7877/home.html
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds."
--Linus Torvalds
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