I installed debian a few weeks ago and I noticed that when an installation
disk is corrupted you have to start the installation all over again. If I
remember correctly there were 7 diskettes. Now, if there's a 20% chance
of a diskette having a read-error, the chance of having to start the
installation a second time is 1-0.8^7 = 0.8 = 80%. If there's a 10%
chance, there's a 48% chance etc. What about giving the user a second
chance when a read-error is encountered? [ yes - I had read-errors ;-) ].
Also I have trouble understanding what all those diskettes are for. My
installation takes 36MB. subtracting /usr/{doc,man,info,X11R6} and
/var/log leaves 18.5MB. 7 diskettes can hold 7*1.44MB = 10MB. When I use
gzip -9 to compress my 18.5 MB distribution it's down to 7MB! Less than
the size of my installation disk and it fits on _5_ diskettes. You get
_tons_ of programs in 18MB.
I installed using ftp. When deb-ftp gets packets it doesn't indicate where
in the process it is. No estimated time is given - no "remaining packets"
is given. [ It would be preferable to be able to check packets as they are
fetched - not as a second step wasting lots of time. Having several
ftp-sessions for speed would also be a plus. ]
I think the fact that the debian installation requires 7 diskettes as
opposed to redhat which requires two (three?) and the seemlingly(?) slow
ftp-installation makes a debian-installation _almost_ an order of
magintude slower/more frustrating to install than redhat.
Is there any help on getting X installed at all? I'm not sure that it
appeared as part of the installation process. I searched around in dselect
and by chance found the xbase package.. then after a round of
installations I found the xfnt packages. There were definitively a lack of
dependencies or something because the X-server won't run without fonts but
xfntbase isn't required by the xserver-s3 package (this is documented in
the info for xfntbase).
while undocumented, both dpkg and dpkg-ftp depends on gcc
(dpkg-ftp uses dpkg --print-architecture which uses gcc)
while undocumented, dpkg depends on perl
( dselect disk installation requires perl)
while undocumented, dpkg-ftp depends on awk
so it seems that order to use dpkg with ftp-support I have to install the
following:
dpkg-ftp and dpkg
libg++
ncurses3.0 (required by dpkg)
perl (required by disk-install and dpkg-ftp)
libnet (required by dpkg-ftp)
libdb1 and libgdbm1 (required by perl)
gcc (required by dpkg)
binutils (required by gcc)
libbfd (required by binutils)
cpp (required by gcc)
gawk,mawk,nawk or some other awk implementation (required by dpkg-ftp)
The packets that are not needed by other parts of my system are libg++,
perl, gcc, binutils, libbfd and gawk - amounting to about 15MB of wasted
space - thanks but no thanks - I think I'll rather live with a broken
installation.
astor
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