Re: Article: Debian's Daunting Installation
There is another way to get Debian potato up and running
quickly with a nice GUI install.
Just d/l the free 'hail' distro from stormix.com or get their
cd and you'll be apt-get'ting in about a half-hour. You can then
remove the stormix stuff (admin pkgs) but keep the stormpkg
manager for a nice graphical front end to dselect/apt-get.
Since the Debian install is daunting this is a good way to
introduce newbies to Debian. After they start using Debian
this way, then their next 'pure' Debian install is a lot less
daunting.
On 05 Oct 2000 15:10:59 -0400, James Antill said:
> 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.
--
gEEk||dOOd^Deb+ian&&XFce>everything goes Pronto(-_-)
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