Re: Article: Debian's Daunting Installation
Christen Welch <chaotic42@pobox.com> writes:
> I could see a person new to computers having some problems
> with installing Debian. It isn't the best install in the
> world. However, anyone who has a good understanding of
> computers (by this I don't mean Start->Programs->MS Word)
> should be able to install Debian with little trouble.
>
> I've installed 1.3 and 2.1 on my system. I upgraded from 1.3
> to 2, then to 2.1, and then was the victim of a hard drive
> death. 2.1 seems to be a lot easier, with the ability to
> choose different installation types.
I'm pretty new to debian, installed my first machine just over a week
ago now. To be fair it was more rushed than I wanted it to be as the
drive for my old machine was dying and I need to reinstall onto a new
drive fast (I was going to play with it on an old machine for a bit).
Now I wasn't "daunted" when I sat down (I'd installed NetBSD about 4
or 5 years ago, and my old machine was an "upgraded" slackware 2
[running glibc2.1.3 etc.]).
> I digress. My point is, Debian isn't difficult, even relative
> to the other 'main' Linux based distros out there, to install.
That's cute, it's loyal, but it isn't _true_.
I'd done a couple of RH/FreeBSD installs and I pretty much put the CD
in configured a bunch of things and pressed go (FreeBSD has to muck
about in ports which isn't as good as it just being there ... but it
was still less painful than debian).
Things that "got" me...
1. The partioning stuff didn't tell me how to make extended partitions
(I realise _now_ that for cfdisk logical == extended, but I didn't
know then). This could be classified as an upstream problem, if you
assume that debian can't use whatever RH uses.
2. Even though I'd changed the default partition setup I didn't change
it much (I just needed a couple of xtra 3 Gig bits on the end for my
old drives and a bigger swap space). But the default partition setup
doesn't make any sense ... it doesn't give a hint of which partition
should be used for which mount ... about half way through the first
install I realised that /var was on / and / was pretty small and so I
probably wasn't goign to be able to get a full install (and if I did
log and cache/apt would be big problems).
To be fair the above was at about 3 am, I decided to sleep and forget
about it at this point.
So the next day...
3. I partitioned properly this time and installed, I didn't really
like they way it would ask me questions while the install was
going. Esp. as I already had working XF86/exim/etc. configs ... but
that was no large pain. However on this second install I'd forgotten
to enable my ethernet card in modconf so I couldn't see my network and
it took me _ages_ to find the "modconf" program. A top level
"deb-conf" which points you at the other *conf programs would have
been a great help.
4. A whole bunch of modules are manually loaded into the kernel, is
there a reason for this (not a big thing, but looks wrong). Did I do
something wrong with modconf ?
5. So the computer rebooted for the first or second time or whatever,
and it was supposed to have installed everything. Yeh right... bits of
gnome were missing (gdm I remember specifically because when I
manually installed/started it it didn't run a window manager). The
ispell language was set to spanish and english/american hadn't been
installed (the look dictionary was on german and also didn't have
either english or american installed). Traceroute was missing (I had
traceroute6 though... gee thanks). I'd asked for a full development
environment and autoconf/automake/libtool/cvs/gdb were all missing as
were the debug version of the c library and gnome headers.
6. There is nothing like rpmfind, eventually I worked out how to do
grep's over /var/state/apt/lists/* to do what I want but it's still
annoying.
7. xemacs with gnus with tm doesn't work at all (Ie. "xemacs -f gnus"
dies on load if you have configured gnus to use tm).
Those were all pretty big annoyances and if I hadn't promised myself
that I would take a serious look at debian after the things I'd heard
about it I'd have probably gone out and bought a RH 6.2 CD.
8. After getting the network and ppp setup I diald up the modem (I'm
ona static modem that's dialid up 24/7 and I'd bee AOL for about 14
hours at this point). I then realised that when I tried to install
stuff it didn't prefer the CD deb lines (I didn't mind so much for
_newer_ versions, but when it's downloading the same version it's
annoying).
9. /etc/network/interfaces doesn't support aliases very well, copy
and paste is your friend but (to be fair RH might be just as bad).
10 dpkg -S isn't as good as rpm -qf in many cases, and things like rpm
-qif have to be done with multiple commands.
11. diald doesn't "just work" if you have ppp configured (in fact I
gave up trying to get it to and just redid the modem config in the
diald sepecific stuff), also "dialid.conf" doesn't inform you that
it's useless because you need to lookin diald.defs and diald.options
as well (my last config for diald only used the .conf file).
12. gnome-apt doesn't allow you to de-select a package after you've
selected one (I'm pretty sure gnome-apt is unsupported, but still).
Having said all that debain _is_ much easier to use _after_ you've
set it up. There've already been a few times when I've done apt-get
install <blah> and I smiled happily. And I'll probably put it on
my other machines, but I doubt I'll recommend it to most people over
RH (unless they can buy it pre-installed).
Which brings me onto my last remark...
13. It's very painful to try and mirror debian, even when you have the
3 binary CD set. There is no apt-mirror package (apt move helps with
moving the files in your apt cache into the right location, but that's
about it). I had to hack up about 3 different versions of a perl
script to get something that was even close to ok (A big gotcha is
that the mirrors don't use symlinks for binary-arch to binary-all so
you download netscape java etc. twice).
I give that to anyone else who wants a copy, but it's still a bit
hacky (you more or less have to put each mirror on a different proFTP
virtual server entry, which is annoying).
> It could be made better, but it isn't worth not using
> Debian over.
I'd say that about the after install experience it could still be a
lot better and it's at least as good as anyone else (and if you are
installing a bunch of software it's better) but the install didn't
even compare to RH IMO (and, yes I will try and help fix it), and I've
heard some of the more proprietry like distros are even slicker than RH.
--
James Antill -- james@and.org
"If we can't keep this sort of thing out of the kernel, we might as well
pack it up and go run Solaris." -- Larry McVoy.
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