On Mon, 04 Sep 2000, Helgi Örn wrote: > Hi all Debians! Yo, > I am a devoted Linux user, running Caldera at work and SuSE at home > (that's also work!). At home I have a dual boot with Win98 and I always Never tried Caldera or SuSE, only RedHat... and I'm not going back to that crap of a mess unless hell freezes over _twice_ ;-) > Debian/GNU is the most interesting projec I can imagine in the world of > software, idealistically it suites me perfect. I really would love to be > able to use Debian as my default OS. Ok. That's the idea. A lot of us would love to help you (and many others) archive that goal. > configure it to my satisfaction, GNOME never worked, ppp never GNOME is in transition right now (in Debian, I mean). Integration with the Helix version of the packages is being worked out as we speak (in woody, potato is, as you know, stable). Still, I don't use it (GNOME is NOT nearly as stable a software as other more "noble" parts of GNU/Linux. I'll try it in a few months when it won't hurt my productivity with crashes). > I've installed it, Debian 2.2 'potato' and it's a total mess! Worst of No, it's not a mess. *Every* configuration file is under /etc somewhere, without too much nesting and it's rather well organized... which is exactly the reason I am NEVER going back to RedHat (maybe SuSE and Caldera are better organized than Debian, I wouldn't know). Also, as a rule, upgrading won't cause you to lose any configuration changes you did. Which doesn't mean Debian is always easy to configure, mind you. So let's try to help you with that :-) > all is dselect, after the main installation I used dselect to install > some extra packages, took me around two hours to go through the whole dselect is not very intuitive for most people, and it takes time to get used to it. It took me one month go get confortable with dselect (and quite a number of mistakes, obviously). There are other package front-ends in production, you could try "aptitude" or "console-apt" and see if they suit you better. I *think* there was a GNOME front end as well, and there's nothing stopping you from using third-party front-ends such as the one made by stormix, which I heard is rather nice. > collection. When it came to installing the packages it only installed a You can make your life much easier using searchs to locate what you need instead of going over the entire list. "apt-cache search", and pressing '/' in dselect comes to mind. You don't NEED to deal with dselect to install packages, most of the time, a simple "apt-get install packagename" is enough. apt-get does not help you deal with weak dependencies (suggests:, recommends:) very well, though. For that, I always use dselect. I just love the power of "apt-get dist-upgrade", though. > few of what I had chosen, some only partially, but most of them it > didn't install at all. I believe you have set dselect up for the "apt method" (option 0) as recommended (or is it done automagically now?) in the initial setup? If not, do it. You have to refresh the package list from time to time (use dselect update. BTW, this will also refresh apt's package list if dselect is using the apt method). If you have an old package list, some packages won't be found in the ftp servers. > Are there bugs in dselect? Yes, see http://bugs.debian.org/dselect But dselect DOES work, and after you get used to it, you won't have much trouble to install anything. The trick is to learn how the "solve a dependency problem" screen works, and to notice that dselect will sometimes ask you to solve MORE than one (unrelated) conflict at the same time, so you have to pay attention to the screen to know what the problem with a given package is. Always remember you CAN force dselect to accept a certain selection of packages, no matter what (but it will bug you forever about the issue :-) ). You can also revert any suggestions it makes. Read the docs and help file. As for configuring the packages themselves, you could install some "administration tools" (look for them in the package lists, or try apt-cache search out), but the tool-proof way of doing it is to read the manpages and docs (in /usr/doc/packagename), go to /etc, and use your favourite text editor to get the configuration to your exact liking without worring about dumb tools screwing up with your mind. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh
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