Re: Enough time wasted, moving on
On Wednesday 06 Mar 2002 2:25 am, Corrin Lakeland wrote:
> Firstly, stable vs woody. We recently had a thread on -devel where we
> concluded that ordinary users are best running testing. You can't complain
> they have a hard time installing testing when that is what we tell them to
> run. Yes the installation CDs may be fscked, but it sounds like the
> problems Harry had were to do with installation in general and the CDs
> didn't get in the way to me.
Install using potato cd's, upgrade to woody afterwards is the way to go. It's
a bit premature to start slagging off the woody install cd's when it hasn't
even released yet.
> After plugging everything in I was relieved to see lilo come up and things
> seemed to be booting fairly well. Suddenly a kernel panic came on screen,
> whoops :-(. I rebooted and picked one of my older kernels from lilo ... X
> fails to start but I get a login prompt. For those interested, after a bit
> of experimentation with recompiling the kernel I've found the K7 option
> seems to cause problems.
OK, so you had problems with a self rolled kernel. What's that got to do with
the pre-built kernels that will eventually ship on the woody cd ?
> My next problem was getting X and the modem working. I've got an ISA modem
> which I've been using on IRQ 4 at 3F8, I found it worked more reliably than
> a PCI winmodem. pon resulted in the required beeping noises, much to my
> relief, but /var/log/messages informed me my serial line wasn't clear with
> bit 7 set to zero. Repeated attempts failed at different stages, once even
> managing to connect. wvdial claimed not to be able to find the modem at
> all. Do you realise just how hard it is to do _anything_ in debian without
> access to the net? I wasn't able to get documentation or install useful
> looking packages. After a while I guessed an IRQ conflict with the bios,
> disabled the built in serial ports and the net came up. Good old ISA...
There is usually a lot of docs on the cd's.
apt-get install doc-linux-html lynx . Read the Modem How-To.
> Next was X. Something with the framebuffer was working since I had a
> penguin coming up on startup. According to the motherboard's manual I had
> a via chipset which is uses some trident blade chip. However X autodetect
> refused to find my mouse (PS2)... Eventually I worked out that for some
> reason .devfsd had dissapeared so devfsd wasn't loaded, and so my mouse
> device didn't exist.
Framebuffer ? devfsd ? Aren't these marked *experimental* in your kernel
config ? What you choose to include in your kernel is your business. I just
don't see the connection with the woody install process....
> Unfortunatly, booting X resulted in lockups and similar. I had carefully
> set things like 640x480 resolution with a low referesh rate to avoid this.
> It turned out to be a bug in the video card's driver and required manually
> disabling X extensions in the XF86-Config file.
I grant you X installation could be easier, but it is already a lot easier
than X3.3. Progress is being made. Are you sure your problems were not
related to running a framebuffer ?
> Sound required a number of attempts at recompiling the kernel and I still
> don't have ALSA or arts working.
Again ALSA is not in the 2.4.x series kernel. It will be in 2.6. How is this
Debian's fault ? Could you have got your sound card going with a pre-built
kernel by selecting the appropiate OSS/Kernel modules ?
> Anyway, my point is that installing Debian is a nightmare compared to
> anything else. Compare the leaps and bounds that system ease-of-use has
> gone through over the past two years, and then look at the installation
> process. I know there are projects working on this, but they aren't here
> yet, so I think Harry's point is fair.
I like the level of control the current install method gives. Should the day
arrive that we have some flash graphical automatic installer, I hope it will
be an alternative rather than a replacement.
> PS: Not that installing XP is any better. The one time I did that I had to
> rip every single piece of hardware out of the machine to get it to install,
> and then add them back one by one. Without ripping anything out, the
> installer either hangs or leaves the system unbootable.
So much for flash graphical installers....
Simon Hepburn.
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