Installation notes - debian 1.2 stable, as shipped on the January InfoMagic Developer's Resource
Here are some observations and problems I found with attempting to install Debian 1.2 from the latest Infomagic CD. I realise that some of the problems listed here have been addressed already, but I haven't seen anyone else post about problems with the CD specifically, so I thought I would. Warning, this is quite long. Also, please don't take the conclusions at the end as an invitation to a flame war. I wish I had the time and the disk space to have helped test the release earlier before it shipped, but I didn't. First, someone needs to get Infomagic to add the install doc to the booklet they ship with the CD. There are quick start instructions for Slackware and Redhat but Debian is not even mentioned. The first thing that struck me (and I know this is a common complaint) was the number of disks it took. It's up one from the last time I installed Debian over a year ago. ;( Being a very cautious person when it comes to upgrades, though I had a previously installed debian 1.?? system, (what ever the pre-release ELF version was that was around last Xmas), I decided to do the new debian install on a fresh disk. I wanted to see what a "from scratch" install was like anyway, because I really like Debian's layout and had been suggesting it to people over Redhat, and a few had complained that it was too difficult to install. I prefer Debian because I like the choices made in how the system is laid out, the arrangement of configuration files, and the ease of upgrading (sometimes, more on this later) Whenever I have installed a debian package, I've always been pleased with the choices the maintainer made of where to put things, as they usually fit my interpretation of the FSSND. First, I think there could be a smaller install set designed. I don't have a CD drive on the computer I installed on, it's on my other computer and I export it over NFS. I would think that for situations like this, or even an ftp install, you could pack enough on the boot floppy and one other floppy which just stayed in the floppy drive to get up and running. If I get time to play with the tools for making debian boot kit's I may try to do this. (Is there a way to load more than one floppy's worth of data into a ram disk without using multiple ram disks like Redhat used to?) On to the install, once the floppies were prepared. The initial floppy install went well, the computer rebooted and then it was into dselect. Much has been written on dselect, and I'm afraid I find a lot of it true. It is confusing, non-intuitive, cluttered, and overly verbose. I did not want to just select install everything, and with the way the presentation was laid out, I found it frustrating to find the packages I did want and ended up basically just installing the recommended preselected stuff. (Note here: I think rather than one recommended install set, a few would be a good idea. A workstation default, which fits what dselect currently offers, a server default, which would leave out TeX and other packages like that and a few sub-groups under these might be a better option) This went relatively smoothly, but again, dselect seems very slow as it prints endless messages about how it is skipping unselected packages. This seems to be the major problem I have with dselect, it bombards you with information constantly, making it difficult to focus on which is important and which can be ignored. However, a more serious problem arose as it worked it's way through the packages I selected. On the Infomagic CD, there are some duplicate packages, with different version numbers and dselect would install the newest then replace it with the older version. The packages I saw this problem with included man, ppp, tcsh and xbase. After the packages were installed, there were also some configuration problems. TeX, part of the default install, would not configure correctly because it couldn't find libXext. This was actually installed but it appears that the post install routine didn't do an ldconfig, and I don't think it put the path to the X11R6/lib directory in /etc/ld.conf. X in general was a bit of a problem, because when you configure it, after setting up the X server, the install program tells you that Debian puts that XF86config file in /etc/X11, and asks if you'd like to put it there. Then, when it tries to test the server, it fails because it doesn't install a symlink somewhere where the server can find the file. (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11?) And, if when the script asks you if the server worked, you answer no, it exits and it is then impossible to convince any package that X is installed. Not only that, there doesn't appear to be any way to rerun the configuration to set this right. This made trying to install any other X related packages a pain, because they all claimed that the required X11R6 needed was missing. Another problem was GCC. I selected both the regular gcc and the a-out gcc, and somehow I ended up with a gcc binary version 2.7.2, but everything else for gcc was 2.7.2.1. I copied gcc 2.7.2.1 over from my other machine to fix that. On a more minor note, Smartlist doesn't work if you install smail instead of sendmail. It tries to run newaliases which smail installs in lib/smail, which is not in your path. Smail should probably create a symlink somewhere in the regular path. In attempting to cure the unrecognised X11 problem and add some new packages, I re-ran deselect several times, and every time it would attempt to install everything again, and in the cases where it had installed an older version of a newer due to duplicates on the CD, it would install first the new one, then overwrite that with the older one again. I had to manually set all the installed packages with = to get it to stop doing that, and even then, as mentioned above, it had to look at and report that it was skipping those packages. I think once a package is installed dselect needs to mark it as not needing further attention until it is asked to do an update scan, either via a new CD or an ftp session, and finds a newer version. Another problem I ran across was with tk/tcl. On the infomagic CD there are tk versions 40, 41 and 42, and tcl versions 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6, and the interdependencies between them are very confusing. This was compounded by tcl not wanting to install because it didn't believe X was installed. Finally, still with a system with a bunch of broken packages, I pointed dselect at the ftp option. After scanning the ftp site, dselect came back with a list of packages that were upgrades to packages that I had installed. This part I like!!. Many of the packages that were available as updates fixed the multiple version problems I was having, so I suppose that people are aware of the problems with the original stable release. Another place where dselect showed it's propensity for unneeded messages was when I went to download these updated packages. Dselect checks the sizes of the packages and the amount of disk space you have, and then rather than do the math itself, presents you with a warning screen showing you the total download size and the amount of disk space and asking if it's ok to download the files, even though there was 10X more disk space available than was needed. This highlights, to, me a major problem with dselect. It doesn't differentiate between errors, warnings, suggestions and inquiries. They are all presented in exactly the same format. As there was a new xbase on the ftp site, I finally managed to get a second chance at configuring X, and this time I lied and told it that the X server had worked when it didn't. This got X at least marked as installed, which allowed me to fix a lot of broken packages finally and go on to final setup and running the system. This is where, IMO, parts of Debian really shine. Highlights are the smail, named and inn configuration. All the packages install pretty reasonable config files and examples. I mounted my /local drive on /usr/local and was able to get all my locally customised stuff up and integrated quite easily into the new system and everything seemed to run fine, but I hit one show stopper (for me, but if someone's planning to use Debian as a base for a dial up server, watch out) Something is broken about PPP in the current setup, as of the latest packages on Jan 4 on the ftp site. My old setup, which as I mentioned was built on a Debian base from last year, mostly upgraded by hand with some debian but mostly non-debian packages, up to libc 5.4.17, kernel 2.0.27, and ppp 2.2.0f, basically the same packages in the latest debian, is set up as a dial up ppp server using mgetty's PAP recognition, and works fine. I have a Cyclom board that the modem's are connected to. So, after getting everything set up, and copying in my mgetty and ppp config files, one of my friends tried to dial in. As soon as a ppp connection was made, I started getting kernel panics. Even at high levels of debugging, I couldn't figure out why. To try to figure out what was going wrong, I first installed my own copy of ppp2.2.0f, then tried recompiling the kernel. (that's when I discovered the mismatch between gcc and the rest of the installed compiler) Then I recompiled ppp from scratch. That didn't work either, so at that point, I rebooted from my other disk and, of course, ppp worked fine again. I don't know if there's a bug in libc-5.4.13, but that's the only thing I didn't try updating. At that point I just felt it was no longer worth the effort, and scrubbed the disk. My conclusion is that I can't currently recommend to people who ask me that they should go with Debian except possibly for those who want to do a minimal install and then use that as a base to build their own system by hand, which is my usual method. At least the version on the Infomagic CD set is barely installable, and dselect still needs a lot of work to become really usable for a new installation. I think the interface to dselect needs some serious redesign. As I mentioned earlier, there currently is no differentiation between errors, warning, and suggestions. The various layout choices you get from the o key all leave you with choices that are quite complicated. My suggestion would be to have dselect work like a folding editor, so the initial presentation was quite compact. Then, by opening various categories of choices, more and more information is presented to you. As well, the selection screen should take up at least 2/3 and possible 3/4 of the the screen real estate, not the mere 50% it does now. This would allow you to at least see a bit more of the selection. As well, I think it's really annoying that it shows you a help screen every time it switches to a new mode. The first time is fine, but every time is annoying. Other problems with dselect appear to be bugs, like it's failure to mark installed packages as installed and it's installing of older packages over newer ones when both exist on a CD. -- John Henders - System Administrator - Mindlink!/Wimsey -- John Henders - System Administrator - Mindlink!/Wimsey -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
