[Note: This is mostly a translation of a news article, I posted in a german
linux newsgroup some time ago. The mail is just "crossposted" to
debian-devel, I do not read the group (but I do read debian-user).
]
A few weeks days ago, I've been upgrading my server box (which is running
Linux since more than 3 years) using the debian distribution from the
Infomagic Developers Resource. This is my installation story, maybe it's
of interest for you.
As a short introduction: The linux box is a 486/100 with 32 MB of RAM, 3GB
of SCSI disks, an Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller, an S3 PCI video card, a
Teles ISDN card and a 4 port serial card. I had a german Linux distribution
installed for more than one and a half years, before that, I was running
the old SLS distribution for about the same time. With both distributions,
I had a lot of self-compiled software. When upgrading from the SLS the
other time, I needed a whole week to get the stuff running including all
those little changes you have to apply to a system until it really works.
I decided to use an upgradable distribution this time, so this will
hopefully never hit me again.
In the last few months, I've installed SUSE Linux (a german linux
distribution) on two other boxes. I do not have any experiences with other
linux distributions like Redhat or Caldera.
All the following stuff is written from what I remember, I did not write
down any notes. So it may be inaccurate in some places.
cdrom
There is a link to a non existing directory on the cd: The "info" directory
is a link to "doc", but "doc" does not exist (there is a directory named
"docs"). This is a pity, since an unexperienced installer may search
information in "info" - and will fail.
Creating the installation disks
Debian needs more disks than the distributions, I have handled until now.
Other distributions are able to install from NFS, even the base system.
With debian, you need to install the base system from floppy disk, after
that, you may access a cdrom or a NFS server (but: see below regarding the
installation of the NFS module).
Modules
After installing the base system, one has to install some modules in
addition to the kernel. This was the first thing, I had lots of problems
with.
a. There is *no* documentation of the modules, why they are needed and
so on. There is a reference to a module description, but at this place,
I did not find anything like that. Some modules do not even have a
short description (like "SCSI driver")!
When selecting "Network modules" there is a module named "xd" - but
there is *no* hint what this module does. If I select this module, I'm
prompted for "command line parameters" for this module. And this goes
on: There is no module that has a description that exceeds 3-4 words,
in many places, even this short description is missing. The command
line parameters are probably very secret - they are documented nowhere.
This scenario is very bad for a beginner, who wants to give Linux a
try...
b. Debian has lots of problems when loading the modules. After installing
some of the modules, the display shows them as "not installed" and
there was no way for me to figure out, if the installation failed or
the display was wrong. In other places, the installer tries to install
the module, regardless of the fact that I left the dialog using the
"Cancel" button. There seem to be other modules that have dependencies:
Trying to install some modules I got errors that vanished, when I
installed other modules first.
c. Some modules have errors when loading. The NFS module for example
prints an error message about the module infos having the wrong
version.
d. There is no way to figure out, which drivers are already compiled into
the kernel, and which must be loaded as modules. Selecting SCSI
modules, there are no Adaptec drivers. Does this mean, they are
already compiled in, or is this an error in the installer?
Selecting the language and keyboard mapping
Language selection in other distributions (Suse for example) is done by a
list of the available countries. After selecting language and keyboard
mapping, an input box is presented where the user can test his keyboard and
cancel the selection if necessary.
The debian installer instead shows a list of the names of the keyboard
tables. How should a beginner know, that "de-latin1-nodeadkeys.map" is,
what he needs for his german keyboard? And what, if he's wrong? There's no
way back, at least not for an unexperienced Linux user.
Selecting the packages
I know that user interfaces are a matter of taste. Anyway, the program for
package selection (dselect) seems to be very non intuitive. Every program
under linux comes with it's own unique command keys. This must have been the
cause to choose another incompatible set of commands for dselect. The space
bar ends the help screens (less for example uses space for paging), return
ends the selection and so on. A menu interface would have been a very good
decision - remember, newcomers should use this program.
If I select a package that has mutual exclusion with other packages, the
help screen for the following problem list is presented. This is nice the
first one or two times - but then I'm getting tired about it. Each time,
I have to quit the help screen to see the problem list.
Another problem are dependencies with packages that are not included with
debian Linux. Getting a message like "xyz needs abc - abc does not seem to
be available" is somewhat frustrating.
Installation
After selecting "install" I get an error message, that says, the cdrom is
already mounted. Maybe this is right (dselect must have read the package
list from somewhere), but why doesn't dselect unmount the cd?
After unmounting the cdrom manually and selecting "install" again, I get an
error message that the gcc package is not available. After trying a few
things I noticed that I could not find the error and deselected the package.
A few days later, I noticed that this is because of a wrong link in the
Debian-1.1-fixed/binary-i386/devel directory: The link gcc_2.7.2-8.deb
points to the file Debian-1.1/binary-i386/devel/gcc_2.7.2-8.deb, but
unfortunately this file does not exist, instead there is a file named
gcc-2.7.2-8.deb (note the '-'). To my suprise, another day later,
installing the gcc package succeeded...
I do not know what happened, my assumption is, that the installer did select
the other subdirectory - I do not know why and there is no way to figure
this out, since dselect does not display anything about the version or
directory it uses for the install process.
Installing packages
Compared to other distributions, the installer and the packages seem to be
very ... unfinished. Here are some things that happened (more than once):
a. Some packages do not install because files are missing. One example
is the apsfilter package: After choosing "Deskjet" the install
procedure tries to read a file containing the different printer types.
This file is missing and the installation is aborted.
b. The install process asks at many places for information, but wrong
input is not checked and leads to aborts. So, when I got a question
like "Do you want ... (y/N)?" I answered with 'N' instead of 'n' (I
admit that I have been a little bit absent in this moment :-). The
'N' as input aborted the shell script with something like "Parse error
in line ... near token :]". The installation of the current package
is aborted as you may imagine.
c. The installation process is sometimes very ridiculous. On example is
the X installation: For every X server, I'm prompted if this should
be my default server, regardless of the fact, that I did already
choose the default server!
d. There are other things that do not seem to work correctly, I could
not figure out why. Some installation scripts say "Cannot determine
hostname" even if I did set the hostname correctly.
Reboot
After rebooting, I get a mail *every* *minute* because there was an error
with the NIS installation. I could not find the problem, so I disabled the
daemon manually.
Some time later...
There have been more quirks, I did not mention in the original (german)
posting:
* The installer did not create the wtmp file, so some programs failed
to work.
* More things, I do not remember now.
Bottom line:
The debian distribution is *not* recommended for beginners. This does not
mean that the distribution is bad, but I have to admit, that it did not meet
my expectations. I had to fight lots of problems, much more problems than
with the other distributions I installed in the last time. I have been able
to remove the problems in many cases, but this was not easy sometimes,
and a beginner will probably never get this far. Things like the gcc problem
or the abort on wrong input show that there is more testing needed before
putting things into the "stable" branch (or does the "stable" mean the
software itself, not it's installation?)
Before flaming me:
This is not debian bashing! I asked the question "Is the debian distribution
suitable for a beginner?", and the text above answers this question from my
point of view.
I know, that the debian developers did invest a lot of work into the
distribution without getting any money for their work. I know also, that
developing software for the linux community is hard work, so I would like
to thank the debian developers at this point. Another thing worth to note
is, that I did not test any of the "advanced" features of the debian
distribution like the upgradability. This is one of the features that
distinguishes debian from most other competitors, and probably the feature,
where debian really shines. But, since many people in the newsgroups ask
questions about the "best" distribution, it must be allowed to judge a
distribution for it's suitability for beginners.
My personal oppinion is, that the debian distribution shows some promise,
and I will try hard to get the installation right. But comparing the work
that is needed for an installation with other distribution, debian looses by
a wide margin. If someone is interested in debian, it may be better, to wait
some time...
Some things, I can think of to make debian better:
* Check the debian tree for wrong links in a regular manner. As noted
above, wrong links are a problem with the current debian release.
A daily executed cron job should remove this kind of errors.
* Stable should mean that not only the software is stable, but also the
installation.
* There should be help for the module installation. One simple way would
be, to show the appropriate man page/doc file, when selecting F1. This
is not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.
* Dselect has many problems. It should have a menu selection, the commands
are very non intuitive and the screen layout is confusing.
I hope this text is helpful for one or the other. Hints are welcome, flames
are nullified through my special High Performance Null Device(TM).
Best regards
Uz
--
Ullrich von Bassewitz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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