Hi, I'm new to Debian (not to Linux though; I've used RedHat for some time now). I did a fresh FTP install of Hamm yesterday, choosing the "Sci. Workstation" profile to avoid/postpone a manual package selection using dselect. All went okay, except for the emacs20 package.
It won't get installed (as well as emacs20-el, auctex, psgml and w3-el, since they depend on it). During the configuration stage in dselect I get screens full of error messages regarding references to free variables. Anyone had this problem too? Should I upgrade to a version in Slink? My first impression: Debian does not meet up with its reputation of being hard to install or configure. Used to installing RedHat RPM packages, I especially liked the post-install configuration scripts (answer a few questions and you're ready to go) instead of RedHat's pre-defined package configurations. By adding the install stage in which "task profiles" can be selected, the manual package selection using dselect can be avoided because a sensible pre-selection of packages has already been made. In this way the installation gets about as easy as RedHat's, and dselect simply becomes a powerful tool (without an equivalent in RedHat) for maintaining the packages instead of the most difficult part of the installation. Shouldn't this be mentioned in the install guide? Thanks, Ruud.
