On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Ivan wrote:
> Hello yet again - I was hoping to be able to sit back for a little while > and just read the chat on my new hamm system but I still seem to have some > problems !!! > > Once again the downloading went mostly well but installation and config are > a major problem. > > Initially errors were that ef2sprogs conflicts with dump and perl > pre-depends libc5 (or something like that !) > > After those errors things looked good for a while BUT then a million errors > ( certainly too many to read ) scrolled up the screen and dselect again > gave up in disgust ! Lesson 1: Never install a gazillion packages at one time with dselect. On new installations, one should always first go with the defaults and install those, then select other stuff like X11 an dinstall that and only then install mail/news user agents, cd players and games and the like. If you select 800 packages for installation at once, you're in for a big mess, especially if a couple of packages have slight installation problems. The rest of the packages then tend to follow. It is also very hard to keep track of what happens during installation when you install too many packages at the same time. You miss the errors, but also useful messages of packages that get upgraded successfully and inform you about defaults that have been changed in the newer version. Machine intelligence can only go so far in helping you out, you mustn't push it or be faced with the programmer's good intentions turning against you. In the situation you got into, you may try to get out of the mess by running the Install step a few times. If that also fails, unselect (if possible - I mean don't unselect stuff like base-files) some of the offending packages, run Remove, then Install. If that fixes things, go back and reselect the packages you removed and install them again. > I then chose the "select" option and without making any choices hit enter > to let dselect work out the dependency problems. Without looking I > accepted dselects solution and downloaded more software, allowed install > etc... MORE PROBLEMS > > Most of the problems seem to stem from the non-installation of libc5 and > libg++ ... but I understand from yesterdays talk that these are obsolete. > > What can I do ? Lesson 2: Use your own brain. Computers do almost everything better and faster than humans (including messing things up, but you already noticed that :-) Thinking and problem solving are the exceptions. Dselect will not really do the dependency resolution for you, it will only help you with some suggestions that it can derive from very elementary information like "foo conflicts with bar" and "baz needs bar." It has no notion of high-level concepts like "Ivan wants to upgrade his entire system to libc6." So, dselect will not understand that it might have to install foog (which does not conflict with bar) in place of foo so you can install baz. You have to understand that. A lot of packages (mostly libraries) have been superseded in hamm by a similar package with a letter g appended to the package name. That way, you can have both bazg, the new libc6 version and baz, the old libc5 version (which may be needed by older apps that Debian can't recompile for libc6, like StarOffice,) on your system. So you see that libc5 is not obsolete in hamm. Another case is where development packages, like say foo-dev, have been split up into foo-dev and foo-altdev, allowing you to use either version of the foo development libraries to build libc6 resp. libc5 programs. Libc5 is not at all obsolete in Debian. A sort of exception is the autoup.sh script, which blindly removes all bazs and foo-devs that might be a problem with new packages and leaves it up to you to reinstall the corresponding bazgs and foo-devs or foo-altdevs. > Eventually I moved down the "remove unwanted software" and said "yes". It > seems as though dselect wanted to delete everything on my system - telling > me on many occasions that it was not going to delete a file because it is a > required file (thankfully it again gave up deleting because of the number > of errors) > > I then decided to manually install pine to try to talk to you but again > there was problems. Pine it seems requires ncurses which requires libc5. > Once again I have to talk to you through windoze! ncurses3.0 requires libc5, ncurses-base and ncurses3.4 don't. Try to get your basic system sorted out first before you do the apps. By the way, because of the University of Washington's restrictive licensing, there will not be a pine in hamm. Instead you have to get pine-diff.deb and pine-source.deb and compile a pine.deb yourself. > Final Question: As I have installed (I think) most of the suggested > software for a "dialup user" how can I reinstate the original suggestions > that were made when I first booted into hamm? > (are these suggestions valid ?) AFAIK there is no "easy way." You can get back to the sane defaults however by using the classification that Debian puts on packages. In dselect's selection screen, set the display sort options so that packages are displayed by priority. Read the online help to check which keys to use for this. You must have everything that is marked "required", should have everything that is marked "important" and probably also most packages marked "standard". "Optional" is your own choice and "extra" packages may conflict with (but will replace) "standard" packages. > Whatever help as many people as possible can give me will be appreciated as > I have downloaded almost 1G by now and the ISP is not going to be very > happy with me !!! You can always order a cd. CD's have the advantage that they are still around when you screw up or your system gets hosed in another way (shit happens.) With Debian you only have to keep a minimum of configuration data stored on a couple of floppies to completely rebuild a working system from scratch. Another advantage of cd's is that you can take them to a friend and install Debian on his or her computer. Concluding: You should always look through dselect's selections list after you have updated the available packages list, even when you update on a daily basis. Dselect helps you by putting the new packages up front the first time a new list is displayed. When you are doing a major upgrade, it is very important that you look through the list carefully, maybe even a couple of times. When you are handling conflicts, know the key bindings and how to use them, because you're in control. With the conflicts resolution mechanism of dselect, you can select your entire system to be uninstalled with 3 key presses (if you're an expert, newbies generally need more ;-) .) This is often referred to as "shooting yourself in the foot." Remember that dselect does not know what you want to do. It only knows what you can do. You are the one who has to know what you should do. You may have to know some of what is going on under the hood of your system once in a while. Most people involved with Debian GNU/Linux think that this is actually fun (well, most of the time) and educating. And remember that you learn most of your mistakes :-) Cheers and good luck, Joost -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
