My (hamm) installation tale (long)
Hello... thought it might be instructive to pass along the things that
happened to me when trying to install Linux on my Pentium-133.
Some background: I have never installed any brand of Linux before, but
I've dabbled in Unix and am somewhat familiar with Linux (some friends have
it installed -- RedHat and Slackware). I was told by several people that
they liked Debian best of all. I had not heard of it, but I went ahead and
purchased CDs -- I purchased them through Linux Central, and was impressed
at the low price for which I was able to get them (good!)
I received three CDs -- one for the binaries, one for contrib, and one for
the source.
I had a 1.6G drive and a 4.3G drive in that computer. The 1.6G is the
original disk and the 4.3G was an add-on. I decided to reserve 500M on the
1.6G for Windows and use the rest for Linux.
First problem: The boot.bat script was not in the documented place. This
was no big deal, but cast doubts on the professionalism of the CDs. It is
documented to be in INSTALL, but it was in BOOT (or vice versa).
Second problem: The boot loader could not see the 4.3G drive. I suspect
this is due to the drive layout.... the 1.6G is the PRIMARY controller on
the FIRST IDE. The CD-ROM is the PRIMARY controller on the SECOND IDE.
The 4.3G is the SECONDARY on the SECOND IDE. This was unfortunate because
I had wanted the swap space on the 4.3G. After several false starts, I
finally got around this problem by doing some of the install and then
switching to a second window and manually adding the partitions on the
second disk. I also had to copy files to the correct partition, but it
eventually all seemed to work. I'm not saying that this is a Debian
install problem, but I do think it would be good to point out that this
kind of setup (which really cannot be all that unusual) will have troubles.
Third problem: X will not install because a file is missing from the
distribution (Xsession). This is VERY VERY bad. The first time I
installed, I just ignored the error, but it was frustrating to not have the
capability to run X. The second time I did the install, I looked around
the hard drives and found a file like Xsession.debian (or something like
that). I copied it to Xsession and then I was able to install X. I also
tried to enable xdm, but this was a disastrous mistake -- the system went
into some kind of infinite loop that I couldn't break out of. I had to
start the install again from scratch, which is in itself annoying because
of the need to stop it part-way through and correct the other disks.
Fourth problem: some packages fail to install -- in particular, emacs20 and
a couple of others -- they try to "byte-compile" them (whatever that
means), but the make is unsuccessful There are three packages in this
category. This problem is not fixed, and I'm not sure what to do. My
systems seems to work OK without these (and I don't use emacs anyway);
however, it bothers me that a "stable" package would have these problems.
Fifth problem: After the binaries were installed, I wanted to install the
source and the contrib packages. I spent several days trying to figure out
how to do this, with no success. This is a TERRIBLE problem (like #3).
There is NO instructions on how to do this. The help on the debian site
basically says "do the install" and that's it. When I tried to run
'dselect' on the contrib disk, it wouldn't run without accessing some files
on the main binary CD as well. Because I had the disk space, I finally
copied both the contrib CD and the binary CD to one of my hard drives and
ran the install from the hard drive. This seems like a terrible solution,
since not everyone is going to have enough free space to be able to do
this. Note that it also does not fix the problem with installing the
source. I saw some reference to dpkg-source, but that program/script does
not exist on my system. I finally saw in this group talk about a web site
with the source, so I went there, downloaded it, and installed it into
/usr/src.
Due to my troubles, my friends are thinking of avoiding Debian completely.
I hope some expert will be able to offer some help in these areas.
Now that my system is basically whole, I intend to try to build a kernel,
and then go on to configure my printer and sound card. I am looking for a
printcap file for my printer, but I can write one if I need to.
That's my tale. Advice/suggestions welcome; either to my e-mail address or
this group.
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Richard Losey rlosey@metronet.com
Proud to be a member of CAUCE http://www.cauce.org/
"By His light I walk through darkness..."
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