Re: Need Reasons for switching to Debian from Redhat
>> * Tasksel UI is confusing.
> More specifics here would be useful. How is the UI for Tasksel
> confusing?
>
> Any idea what your neighbor actually selected that caused the exit?
I would have sworn that he just hit "space" to select one of
the tasks, and the program quit.
>> * The dselect UI is completely cryptic.
>
> Ah, after my first look, I never came back to dselect and have found it to
> be more or less unnecessary. Almost forgot it was there. Yes, it is
> cryptic and confusing.
I generally avoid it. But, if you do end up running it, getting
out without stern warnings about breaking your system is (in my
experience) pretty difficult.
>> * Package configuration asks pointless questions.
[...]
>
> Sounds like your neighbor chose a detailed level of
> configuration questions (ie low priority) for debconf. I
> normally go with "medium" which is the default IIRC, and have
> never seen the lynx prompt mentioned above.
I don't remember ever selecting a configuration level. When
does that happen?
> I just reconfigured debconf to low priority, purged lynx and
> reinstalled it. I received no such prompt.
Are you running woody or potato? Most of these problems were
in the intial install process which is installing potato
packages.
> I then tried a dpkg-reconfigure of lynx
> and still received no such prompt. Not sure how your neighbor got the
> prompt.
>> * Setup/configure for a package fails and installer has to be
>> restarted. I counted NINE times through this cycle before
>> we gave up because it was unable to install the remaining
>> selected packages.
>
> Specific packages would be useful here.
I didn't note them. All my installs go that way so I assumed
it was SOP.
>> * After the install was "complete" (cycling through the
>> install wasn't getting any further) we had two permanently
>> broken packages: ldap-something and biff: apt-get -f
>> install was unable to fix the system. We had to purge both
>> of those with dpkg before we could get any further.
>
> Any idea on the package versions?
Whatever was in the "stable" archive yesterday.
>> * After installing using woody floppies, we don't have a
>> woody system, we have a _potato_ system! Now we have to
>> manually edit apt's source list and do an update/upgrade to
>> get a woody system we wanted in the first place.
>> Downloading, installing, and configuring all those potato
>> packages just so they can be replaced with woody packages
>> is a waste of the user's time and bandwidth.
>
> Ahh, this is an item that's bitten a few people now. As I
> understand it, because woody is pending it's release, all the
> installation routines are configured to create "stable" entries
> in the sources.list file. This can cause quite a few
> headaches. I normally don't see this as I use a local mirror
> for all my installations and as such directly edit my
> sources.list for each installation.
>
> This has probably already been asked elsewhere, but is there a compelling
> reason that the woody install uses "stable" vs "woody" in the
> sources.list?
There was a fairly long debate over this in the devel list.
There are two big drawbacks to the current setup:
1) Installing from woody floppies currently produces a potato
system. It's been like this for months and nobody knows
how many more months it's going to last.
2) Having "stable" in the list means that people running
"stable" get a complete system upgrade (whether they want
it or not) when Woody is officially stable.
I don't know of any advantages to the current setup. I think
it would be far better to have woody floppies install woody.
>> * The SVGA X server was never installed, even though the
>> video board was detected correctly during install and X was
>> configured to use the SVGA server. That had to be installed
>> manually via apt-get.
>
> This sounds like XFree86 3.3.x. TMK, woody uses XFree86 4.1.0.1.
Right. But woody floppies don't install woody, they install
potato.
>> * Only a partial set of Gnome packages was selected by
>> tasksel, so about a dozen more had to be installed manually
>> via apt-get.
>
> Tasksel does provide complete information about what packages a given
> option installs. TMK, the list provided is the list it installs.
The gnome problems could have been caused by premature exit of
tasksel. I'm not positive that we checked all of the Gnome
tasks, but I would have thought that checking any of them would
result in a base Gnome system that worked.
>> * LILO was supposedly installed in the MBR of /dev/hda, but
>> the system won't boot from the hard drive. This happens on
>> most of the Debian installs I've done -- I generally
>> install GRUB from sources, since Debian's LILO rarely works
>> for me.
>
> Never experienced this. Only LILO problem I've found is that
> with both a SCSI and IDE drive in the system I can't boot off
> the SCSI, I must use the IDE.
I've always thought this a particularly odd problem since there
wasn't anything unusual about the systems. They all used IDE
drives with a 20M boot partition starting at cylinder 0.
>> * We had to purge GPM in order to get the PS/2 mouse to work
>> properly under X11.
>
> I've found this not to be needed. Many suggest configuring GPM
> to be a repeater and configure X to use the then provided GPM
> device. Personally, I've found that simply configuring GPM not
> to repeat fixed things for me.
I never used mouse stuff in console mode anyway, so purging GPM
is a simple solution.
> But you do have to wonder, what in the "flashy, graphical
> installers" is needed?
The graphics stuff is just icing. I don't care one way or the
other about the GUI part. I just want a simple way to install
a generic X11/Gnome C/C++ development system.
> Can't the same functionality be found in a text based
> installer?
Certainly. RedHat's text-based installer works just fine.
My only complaint about RH is that it's now on multiple CDs so
you can't just go away and leave it alone until it's done.
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