I just tried my first install of Debian. It didn't go very well. Fortunately, I did it in the spirit of a trial run.
I thought I'd list a few of the problems I ran into, in hopes that someone might be able to save me some time getting it right. The main item is that dselect hung repeatedly when it was generating the xfree86 config file--that is the session would not echo, and I couldn't interrupt it with ^c, ^z, or ^d. I have a Pentium 100, 64 MG Ram, and a recently added 13.6Gig Maxtor hard drive + 2 older drives. The install targeted the new drive, which is drive 0. I used the Debian 2.0 CD's from CheapBytes. I had run Maxtor's MaxBlast program, which sticks "EZ-BIOS" in the boot sector to overcome BIOS limitations. I booted off the CD. I tried to give drive parameters at the boot prompt, but it wouldn't take any of the syntaxes I tried were accepted. cfdisk seemed to allow the creation of many logical partitions. I thought they all needed to be within an extended partition. Is that not the case? At any rate, I created logical partitions to hold /, /usr, and swap. I elected to install modules for Win95, ppp, a.out, ppp over parallel ports, and some others. I got the message "Drive 0: deviation=-4080" during the install. Eventually I got a menu of installation types, and picked "home" (though really I want "home" + "development"). I started walking through dselect. It wouldn't take a pointer to my CD for the whole package, and made me walk through the locations of the individual parts. I think the problem was that the CD only contained some of the parts (not contrib or non-free, which are on some of the other CDs in the set). I there a way to make dselect happy when installation materials are spread across several CDs? wwwdialup complained it couldn't find a modem (hardware problem, unrelated to Debian). Then I got to the xfree86 install. A very short way through it started to do the config file. I ran into trouble, and said "n" to installing it. At this point it hung. When I rebooted the system I found it wasn't too functional; man wouldn't work (it complained it hadn't been configured). The next day I tried starting dselect on my own. It reported lots of items not fully installed. I told it to go ahead, hoping this would complete the install. It seemed to do everything; for example, it installed 3 different window managers! This time it got much further in the xfree86 install, actually bringing up a graphic configuration screen. (It also prompted for install of a whole bunch of servers. even though I would think it could recognize that I have an S3 chip). I couldn't get it to recognize my mouse (a MS mouse using a PS/2 port). So I quit. This lead to the xfree86 config module. After failing to get anywhere, I again tried to skip it, and it again hung. The good news was that when I rebooted I had man pages. The other annoyance was that printing did not work, and I got constant messages lp: No printer... I know that these notes may not be sufficiently detailed. I'll keep better ones next time! But if there's enough here for anyone to give me a pointer, I'd appreciate it.
