Re: installation frustration
On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Bill Newman wrote:
> 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.
Is it the cdrom, your computer, or the Debian distribution that's
responsible?
> 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.
True.
> "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.
If this is the Official Debian GNU/Linux CD-ROM, you have a complaint. I
don't know what Cheapbytes Hamm cdroms are like, but their Bo was
disordered.
> 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.
Okay, but why not? Your system must really fly. I could read each "next
step" on a 333 Celeron and an 200 Pentium Pro.
> 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.
Tough.
> 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.
I don't recollect the "automatically" part.
> 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.
Central Standard Time. You might have just picked a geographical location
rather than an explicit zone.
>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 believe the clock installation screens inform you that if your computer
had been running a non-Unix system, then its clock was most likely set to
local time. Therefore, you would answer "no" to the question, with the
result that your clock would be read as local time, and not GMT.
> 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..
This is the major unfriendliness in the Debain install. Let it boot into
Linux, then add your other bootable partition to /etc/fstab, edit
/etc/lilo.config, run /sbin/lilo. For new users, that's a lot of work
(esp. if they are flummoxed by ae or vi, which they most likely will be).
> 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.
Hamm is as solid as they come. Sorry.
(__) Sourcerer
/(<>)\ O|O|O|O||O||O The world hadn't ever had so many
\../ |OO|||O|||O|O moving parts or so few labels.
|| OO|||OO||O||O -- mlo
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