Re: Need Reasons for switching to Debian from Redhat
Grant Edwards wrote:
>
> I've never installed Suse. Installing RH typically
> involves answering a few questions, coming back twice to
> change CDs and answering a few more questions.
> Installing Debian requires constant attention and loads
> of manual adjustments, tweaks, and fixes afterwards.
> Here are the problems seen yesterday:
>
> * Tasksel UI is confusing. I watched as my neighbor was
> accidentally dumped from the program when he thought he
> was selecting a task.
>
> * The dselect UI is completely cryptic. I've been using
> dselect for almost 5 years, and I still find it utterly
> confusing and often get it into a state where I can't
> come up with a legal configuration.
Yep, that's a definite problem.
>
> * Package configuration asks pointless questions. For
> example, my neighbor spent a fair amount on the Debian
> site trying to find out what lynx was and what should be
> used as a default URL. He finally asked me what to use
> for a default URL. Asking cryptic questions like that is
> a waste of the users time.
I agree that I am often faced with cryptic/pointless
questions, but I wouldn't put asking about lynx's default
URL amongst the cryptic - pointless, maybe, but not cryptic.
>
> * 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.
Well that may have been because you were installing a hybrid
of woody and potato - woody base apts and potato everything
else.
>
> * 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.
>
> * 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.
I think this one has been explained before - boot floppies
only point to the 'stable' distribution as boot floppies are
intended for installing stable versions. You were installing
woody before its time, hence the floppies pointed to the
"wrong" place. A stable install (of potato at present) would
not have had that problem, nor will it have that problem
when woody becomes stable. I imagine the reason that
floppies point to 'stable' is because it makes the work of
the boot-floppies team easier as they never have to remember
to rewrite that section of the coding when they go to make
the boot floppies for the next distribution (these guys seem
to be busy enough as it is, having probably some of the
hardest tasks in all of Debian). At any rate, I installed
woody from boot floppies and caught it, opting to alter the
sources by hand. Why was I able to catch it? Because I knew
that I was installing a pre-release version and was on the
lookout for potential snafus.
>
> * 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.
>
> * Only a partial set of Gnome packages was selected by
> tasksel, so about a dozen more had to be installed
> manually via apt-get.
Were these problems potentially related to a false hybrid
install of woody and potato?
>
> * 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.
That did happen with my SCSI drive (/dev/sda of course) on a
system with an IDE drive but three prior installs had gone
ok, including to a SCSI-only system. An option to install
grub as the bootloader would definitely be an improvement
though.
>
> * With LILO broken, it's particularly annoying that the
> boot floppy created during the install takes 15 minutes
> to load the kernel from the floppy (I've seen this on
> multiple different systems). A boot floppy created
> manually using rdev and dd takes about 20 seconds to
> load.
I've wondered about that as well...
>
> * We had to purge GPM in order to get the PS/2 mouse to
> work properly under X11.
That no longer seems to be a problem with woody; I did have
that problem with potato though.
--
David P. James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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