On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 03:10:59PM -0400, James Antill <james@and.org> wrote: > Christen Welch <chaotic42@pobox.com> writes: > > > 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_. > Of course, it's all subjective. I've installed Debian, Red Hat, and SuSE, and they all seemed to be about the same "difficulty" to install. I really didn't like YaST or whatever with SuSE, but it wasn't hard. > 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. > That's just terminology. You call it one thing, it calls it another. It doesn't obfuscate the process, it just uses a different word. > 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 honest, I don't remember the partitioning portions of the other Linux distros. However, unless you specifically set aside another partiton, everything will be on /. For example, hdb2 is my /, and hdb3 is my /home. Seems kind of obvious, but I could see how someone could have problems, sort of. > 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... > heh, I do that alot. I should learn to work on projects while I'm awake. > 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. Yeah, this is what's nice about apt-get, if you know it exists. Package installation needs to be simplified. Dselect is a piece of crap. > > 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 ? > I think this is just the "general use" kernel. I've always recompiled mine. Hardware selection should be replaced with good hardware detection, so that you only load up what you need. > 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 Was a window manager installed? > 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). Now this I don't have a clue about. Mine always installed english > Traceroute was missing (I had traceroute6 though... gee thanks). /usr/sbin/traceroute > 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. Don't know about this either. Can't really comment. > 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. Try apt-find. > 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). > Don't know about this either. Just messed with emacs last night for the first time (I like vi). > 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. Hope some of my suggestions can help someone. > 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). AOL? > 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). Don't know here either (seems like I'm not being very helpful). > 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. I've personally never had problems. > 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). I've never used it :) > 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). Yeah, there are a lot of times that apt-get install just seems to be so great. > > 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. Well, some of your complaints were subjective, but I do see how a lot of this could be frustrating. It's obvious that grandma couldn't install Debian. It is a bit rougher than RH or SuSE. None of my installs have had any problems, and I've talked to quite a few who haven't had any either. I'm glad that you posted with such detail. Maybe someone read your post, and took action on shoring up some of your complaints. I know that there are some in the Debian community who don't want grandma to install it, but those elitist few don't speak for everyone. I personally don't have the raw coding talent to do much at this point about it. I'm glad that you are willing to help. I still stand by my point that there isn't anything in the Debian install (1.3 + 2.1 anyway) that can't be overcome with a bit of patience, and some reading. -- Chaotic42 <chaotic42@pobox.com> http://www.pobox.com/~chaotic42/ http://www.bigplasticfork.org/ The greater the obsticle, the more glory in overcoming it - Moliere
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