tasksel / "X Window System" / Woody
Hello all
I've done my first ever Debian installation - Woody 3.0r2 - but I have
reasonable experience of GNU/Lnux systems, and have worked on pre-installed
Debian systems before.
During installation, I thought I'd add X-windows and a desktop environment.
The installation procedure used 'tasksel' (and all docs I could find
recommended using this rather than diving into dselect). The relevant task
to install appeared to be "End-user / desktop environment". I found that
this gave me both KDE and Gnome, but _no X server_! In the end, I used
dselect to add appropriate things after installation, and eventually got it
going - found in necessary to say "No" to the 'use kernel frame buffer'
question, otherwise X-server for 'nv' (NVidia) wouldn't start - lucky to
find this tip on a web page.
I can't guarantee that there wasn't another task which I should have
installed as well, indeed I might repeat this whole installation from
scratch now I've gained a better idea of the answers to the questions, and a
suitable partitioning scheme, but what I seem to see now is:
/usr/share/tasksel/debian_tasks.desc contains a task "End-user / X Window
System", with task name "basic-desktop". Its description says it will
install X-server etc.
/var/lib/dpkg/available (at least after updating with dselect using apt-get
method) does not contain any packages which claim to be part of task
"basic-desktop", to tasksel does not even display this task on its menu.
I'm not sure what was in 'available' during installation (would have to
repeat the installation), but I believe that my sources.list for apt-get is
set appropriately - 'available' contains plenty packages with e.g. "Task:
desktop" but none with "Task: basic-desktop".
So how was a beginner such as myself supposed to get the X-server installed,
when the recommended use of 'tasksel' during installation didn't offer
anything appropriate, and even managed the rather silly option of installing
KDE and Gnome with no X-server?
I can see from various mailing-list archives that at some point 'tasksel'
changed from including the contents of each task itself, to expecting
"Task:..." lines in the packages. Is this where the contents of
'basic-desktop' went missing?
--
Clarke Brunt
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