Re: Need Reasons for switching to Debian from Redhat

[grante@visi.com]

In muc.lists.debian.user, you wrote:

>|   * 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
> 
> Wow.  That's bad.  I've never seen it take that long.

I've seen it on all the systems I've installed in the past few
months (each with it's own boot floppy).  You can hear the
floppy head stepper motor click once every 20 seconds or so as
it steps to the next track.

>|   * We had to purge GPM in order to get the PS/2 mouse to work
>|     properly under X11.
> 
> Why do people have _soooo_ much trouble with this?

Because the way it gets installed by default is apparently
broken on many systems.

> It is NOT that hard.  I've explained the procedure

That's not the point.

There shouldn't even be a "procedure" required.

It should work as installed.  If the X package and the GPM
package conflict with each other then declare it in the package
rules so that they don't get installed together. Better yet, if
there's a simple procedure that makes them work together put
that procedure into the postinst section of one rules files so
that they do work as installed.

The GPM/X conflict is minor, and it's easy enough to fix.  The
problem is that it's not just that. There are a whole series of
things that don't work unless you know the "tricks".  Tricks
like:

  Edit source list by hand
  Don't run tasksel
  Don't run dselect
  Purge ldap-<whatever>
  Purge biff  
  <whatever the fix is for GPM/X mouse issue>

Some of these are probably caused by the fact that for the past
several months, woody boot media installed additional
(non-base) packages from stable rather than woody.  Hopefully
that problem will be avoided when the next release cycle comes
around, but from what I read on the devel list that's not
likely.

Some people may not like the default set of packages that RH or
Mandrake installs or the partition sizes or some of the package
dependancies, or rpm, or whatever.  But, in the vast majority
of cases, installing using the default selections yields a
working system: You don't have to edit anything by hand, skip
suggested steps, find procedures for getting the mouse to work,
replace LILO with Grub, etc.

I don't think Debian needs a fancy graphical installer.  I do
think the installation ought to produce a working system when
you accept the default choice at each step.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Sorry, wrong ZIP
                                  at               CODE!!
                               visi.com            


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