Debian installation - list of things that make it hard
Hi
I'm experienced with Solaris and NextStep/Openstep -- I've even installed
OpenStep from scratch on several machines. I have the official silk-screened
2.1 CD's. My system is pretty standard, with the exception of having SCSI
rather than IDE. Now I've decided to check out Linux.
I expected installation to go a little more smoothly than it did. As my
contribution, however small, to the Debian effort, here are some of the
things I found confusing, none of which were addressed in the Installation
Guide. Next month, I'll be helping my mother install Debian, so maybe I can
add to this list from the perspective of a non-Unix person then:
- Both Disks 1 and 2 are bootable. Disk 2 should be labeled as being for
"special" situations.
- It is unclear what half or more of the device drivers do in the dbootstrap
selection. Even the ones I kind of know, make me wonder. For example, do I
need "lp" to talk to my printer? Will the serial ports on modern
motherboards work only if I have "serial"? When do I need the standard
"cdrom" stuff? When do I need "generic scsi"? Do I need "ftp" just to be
able to ftp in to my machine? Nothing explains it.
- The tasks selection is superb, but the lists of what packages the various
tasks load are in random order, with no documentation strings like in
dselect, and they are very long. The result is that they are useless in
helping decide which tasks to load. I gave up and guessed what I needed from
the task names.
- After I got to dselect, I mistakenly inserted Disk 1 rather than Disk 2.
It seemed logical enough. But no error message told me what I had done wrong
-- instead they all complained about not finding files. I ended up
reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling from the start TWICE before
finally realizing my mistake. If I'm willing to admit how silly I was, how
many frustrated mutes must there be? This is especially crazy since it
appears one rarely needs Disk 2 anyway. Could they not be made independently
functional?
- Nothing says where to go from here to set up a sound card, a video card,
LILO, or X.
Oh, and a final question that isn't so rhetorical. Is it possible
to use apt from behind a corporate firewall that does *not* seem to do IP
forwarding or masquerading?
I don't know much about firewalls, but I work at a big company where
I can pretty much guarantee I have no influence over its configuration. Can
apt be told about a proxy in the way that, say, lynx can?
- Brian
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