Re: Wanna be a Debian user...
Jeff Hornsberger <jhornsbe@csc.uvic.ca> wrote:
>1. The first thing is that I would like to install completely via ftp. I
>have a CD burner, but I'm not very interested in burning a CD for one
>time use if I don't have to. With RH I just have to get the network boot
>disk image and boot off that and from there it gets everything else it
>needs from the ftp site and path that I specify.
The times I've installed Debian I've only needed two disks: rescue disk
and root disk. With "normal" installations without unusual hardware this
should be all you need.
>It even sets up DHCP for my @home cable modem configuration.
Not sure how the Debian installer handles this. I have a cable modem,
and use the dhcp-client package (there are several alternatives, I just
picked one :)), but I installed all this a long time after installing
Debian.
>2. Another thing that I'm wondering about is that I would like to
>install Woody rather than Potato to get all the latest packages, but
>there seem to be no disks for Woody. Can I use the Potato disks and then
>install Woody packages, or how does that work? Or is Woody completely
>unstable at this point as opposed to "not completely stable"?
woody won't have a proper installer for a while yet, as it's being
extensively reworked. There should be no problem with installing potato
and then upgrading (either with dselect or 'apt-get update; apt-get
dist-upgrade') to woody - Debian is very, very proud of its
upgradeability, and you should only ever need to install Debian on any
given box once.
Be wary about woody, though; it's undergoing some fairly fundamental
changes at the moment (glibc was just upgraded recently, and gcc will
apparently be upgraded soon). I run it happily enough here, but I'm
familiar enough with the Debian packaging system to be able to cope with
the odd packaging weirdnesses that crop up in an unstable distribution.
If you're new to Debian, I wouldn't advise you to run woody straight
away; if you do, you'll probably want to subscribe to the developers'
mailing list, debian-devel, as well as debian-user.
>3. This isn't really related to the installation procedure, but I was
>just wondering why Woody still uses XFree86 3.3.6 and not 4.0.1 (for the
>video cards that are supported), or am I missing something?
The Debian X maintainer is working on it, but is being extremely careful
about the upgrade. If you're interested in testing his pre-release
packages, have a look at the X Strike Force web pages at
<URL:http://www.debian.org/~branden/>. Note the warning in the
changelog:
* DO NOT FILE BUGS AGAINST THIS PACKAGE. IT HAS NOT BEEN OFFICIALLY
RELEASED.
* IF YOU ARE NOT AN X WINDOW SYSTEM BRAINIAC, YOU SHOULD JUST WAIT FOR
OFFICIAL XFREE86 DEBIAN PACKAGES TO BE UPLOADED TO UNSTABLE.
* REPORT PROBLEMS TO debian-x@lists.debian.org, *NOT* branden@debian.org.
Cheers, and good luck,
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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