hello, I do sympathize with lack of knowledge at installation time. We were all there at one time or another. (including myself, I have had to reinstall more then one do to a lack of understanding of linux and the operating system. I would hate to see the boot disks reach 10 disks but I can assume that we will be there in the near future. One of the last steps of the installation is to use a number of different aptions to get more packages dselect, dpkg, apt-get and others that i am forgetting. It maybe prudent to search the debian home page to find out what to do after you got the base system up and running. Everyone has to go through this steep learning curve to learn linux. I know it can be frustrating at times but resources like this mail list, debian documentation project and the linux documentation project are good resources to start out with. If you need doumentation try looking through the /usr/doc directory that at least can give you a start. I hate the editor they put on the base dists ae it is very crude. i wish they could put something else on there (that would fit) This debate whether to include man on the boot disks or not has been going on for a long time before I got interested in linux and will be here long after I leave. I am sorry if I don't think like you on this subject. But I would always try to help people with linux if they are "newbies" or "guru's" (general understanding relatively useless) If there is anything I can help you please let me know. I would be more then happy to help if I can. Paul
On Wed, 27 Jan 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 1/26/99 7:34:37 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > Well think about this? do you need to install all of the pakcages under > windows3.x or windows9x to get it to work. games solitaire and > mindsweeper. you don't need man-db to get linux running. that is the issue > not the convience of the "newbie" to make it easier to install. if you > want that try windows operating system. windows comes on a cd to install > the complete windows operating system you need roughly 150-200 megs of > hardrive space. Is this what you want. the next thing people will want who > are new to linux will be emacs. > As I stated in the this thread man-db is not necessary to get linux up and > running it is there for convience. > I'm beginning to think I'm talking to a brick wall on this, but I do have a few more comments... * I'm not saying we should go the Winblows route and install ALL of Linux's packages at initialization time. And, just for the record, you can choose to NOT install the games, and other Winblows "packages" as well (including it's help facility), as needed by the installation. Basic, minimal installations do not take 150-200M, in fact, my current heavy installation doesn't even take up that much space. * I think it's a rather large leap from saying help manuals would be beneficial to saying new installations should include emacs. * I recognize that man isn't required for Debian installation. * I, and I am positive I'm not alone, would be willing to download an extra (optional) disk at install time so I could get a basic man set, with the full package being available as it is now - just so I wouldn't be completely in the dark once the install program completed. Frankly, I don't see why there is such strong resistance to discussing this. I understand it's policy to include only required packages on the boot disks; fine, however policies should be flexible or at least allow for consideration on modifications. It would make things ALOT easier for us new folk to have something to reference early on - although I'm getting the feeling from responses to my posts on this issue that some of us aren't really interested in making Debian a bit more newbie friendly, and that's a shame. Jay
