installation frustration
I'm an experienced Linux user. I just tried to install Debian on my
Toshiba 225CDS. It was not a good out of the box experience.
I ordered the most recent CD Cheapbytes had -- 2.0 (hamm).
Booting from the CDROM fails -- the console announces that Linux is
being loaded, but then the system suddenly reboots itself, starting
over from self test, etc.
I ran across various obvious and not-so-obvious errors in the install
documentation. "install.txt" has obvious errors in machine
translation from HTML, e.g.
"Otherwise, you can retrieve them from urlnam, or a similar
directory in any of the Debian FTP mirror sites."
and elsewhere, with "urlnam" in place of a real URL.
"install.html" is unclear about the various install options, e.g.
"Since you'll boot Linux from a floppy while installing it, it
is important that the BIOS enables booting from a floppy disk."
even though -- I believe -- one can go through the entire Debian install
process without ever booting from a floppy. And "install.html" also
says that BOOT.BAT is in \BOOT when it's actually in \INSTALL, and
just says that you should run it when what you should actually do is
"CD \INSTALL", *then* run it.
Once I figured out where BOOT.BAT was, I was able to run BOOT.BAT from
Win95 "DOS mode", and Linux was able to start without crashing. So the
installation proceeded, but then there were other problems.
The install process pops up text windows which then get overwritten by
other text windows before it's possible to read them, and there's no
way to go back. Disturbing.. Finally at the end of the install process
the window stayed up long enough that I could see that it just says
"Please wait, the system is determining the next step." This is IMNSHO
not good UI behavior.
The install process hung rather late (after much walking through menus
to select modules, etc.) on my first try through. There were no error
messages, just no response from the system, even to Ctrl-Alt-Del. The
problem occurred right after I had the temerity to try switching
virtual consoles, so I started over again and avoided switching
virtual consoles, and didn't have that problem again.
When choosing modules, the PPP module description says something that
I (experienced with Linux, also some experience with SunOS and AIX
system administration) couldn't understand about relying on serial.o
and not being able to detect it automatically. I tried selecting the
serial module by hand, but I'm still not sure that's what was
intended.
It's probably unusual ignorance on my part, but I found the time zone
names confusing, and I didn't have any idea where to look up their
definitions. Just a pointer to a net resource defining them would be
really nice. I was looking for CST, and ended up with CST6CDT, which
might be what I need for Dallas for all I know, but I'm certainly not
confident. I also found the description of the "system clock in GMT?"
question to be confusing -- I wanted to keep the system clock in local
time. I freely admit this is rather silly on a laptop, but
Microsoftware does like it, and I have fairly compelling reasons to
dual boot Win95 on my system. It was unclear to me from "install.html"
whether this is supported by Debian: "Unix and Linux keep GMT time on
the system clock and use software to convert it to the local time
zone." So what's the point of the install question? Can Debian Linux
be made to work in local time, or not? It seems to work in RedHat, but
from all I could see of the Debian documentation and behavior, it
might be that all Debian does is a one-time clock adjustment.
I found the documentation of the "Create Master Boot Record?" question
to be unclear. Since my laptop allows me to run with either a CDROM
installed, or a floppy installed, but not both, I was pretty much
stuck modifying the MBR. I couldn't tell from the documentation
whether the installation procedure would do the right thing with other
bootable partitions on the system, leaving them accessible at the LILO
"boot:" prompt, but I figured that since dual boot systems are
ubiquitous in the Linux world, and since RedHat (even version 4.x)
does the right thing, and since the documentation doesn't warn about
it, the Debian install procedure would do the right thing. Silly me..
Upon rebooting the system, LILO doesn't prompt for a choice of OS, but
simply loads the /dev/hda2 Linux image that the hamm install created.
I find this annoying in principle -- I've seen Linuxers flame
Microsoft for the making screw-up-the-boot-of-all-alternative-OSes
operations part of their installation procedures, and I think they're
justified. In my special case, it's also an annoying practical
problem, since as described above my laptop can have a floppy
installed, or a CDROM installed, but not both, and since as described
above the Debian rescue disk image on the CDROM crashes immediately
when I try to boot directly from CDROM.
By holding down the CapsLock key, I can get LILO to prompt for a
choice of OS, but the only choice is Linux -- my Win95 partition isn't
an option. I guess I need to start apologizing for Microsoft's
installation procedures now..
I've used RedHat 4.0, 4.2, 5.0, and 5.1 on three different machines,
with some degree of success, but I've been fairly frustrated with
RedHat's un-transparent and sometimes flaky sysadmin tools, and with
their weird sysadmin philosophies (one GID per UID?). Some overall
system reliability problems didn't help, either. I'd heard that Debian
was cleaner, so I was enthusiastic about trying it. But now, unless
someone can reassure me that slink is a whole lot more solid than
hamm, or someone can point me to some other distribution which really
is more solid than RedHat, I'm ready to decide that I didn't
appreciate RedHat nearly enough, and set about using RedHat 5.2 to
repair my poor comatose laptop.
Unhappily,
Bill Newman
"Please, please, don't ask about the laptop!" -- Dilbert
Reply to: