Christen Welch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 03:10:59PM -0400,
> James Antill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Christen Welch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > >
[ snip ... ]
> > 1. The partioning stuff didn't tell me how to make extended partitions
> > (I realise _now_ that for cfdisk logical == extended, but I didn't
> > know then). This could be classified as an upstream problem, if you
> > assume that debian can't use whatever RH uses.
> >
>
> That's just terminology. You call it one thing, it calls it
> another. It doesn't obfuscate the process, it just uses a
> different word.
Not quite...
Yeh, and I admit it was between 1-3am after my disk started to fry
when I was doing it. But I "knew" that disk partition went...
<primary 1>
<primary 2>
<extended block 1>
<logical 1>
<logical 2>
<extended block 2>
<logical 1>
...
So I kept looking for how to create the extended section so I could
put my logical sections in there (I'd only used fdisk before and that
makes you create the extended blocks ... or the RH DiskDruid (?)).
Maybe it was just lack of sleep and inability to think beyond all my
data that I needed to save quickly.
> > 2. Even though I'd changed the default partition setup I didn't change
> > it much (I just needed a couple of xtra 3 Gig bits on the end for my
> > old drives and a bigger swap space). But the default partition setup
> > doesn't make any sense ... it doesn't give a hint of which partition
> > should be used for which mount ... about half way through the first
> > install I realised that /var was on / and / was pretty small and so I
> > probably wasn't goign to be able to get a full install (and if I did
> > log and cache/apt would be big problems).
>
> To be honest, I don't remember the partitioning portions of the
> other Linux distros. However, unless you specifically set aside
> another partiton, everything will be on /. For example, hdb2 is
> my /, and hdb3 is my /home.
>
> Seems kind of obvious, but I could see how someone could have problems,
> sort of.
IIRC the defaults were something like...
<primary 1> = small amount of data (100 Meg ish)
<primary 2> = swap
<primary 3> = about 10 Gig I think
<primary 4> = the rest of the drive (about 35 Gig).
...this could be slightly out but it was sort of like that (Ie. small,
swap, fairly big, and rest).
I'm guessing now that it assumed...
p1 = /boot
p3 = /
p4 = /home
...but even that looks wrong, why would you want a 100 Meg /boot.
The point was that in RH when partitioning the default is what the
program thinks it should be mounted as. Where as the debian one always
defaults to the first available drive (this was even worse in my case
as I had a bunch of SCSI drives that were always positioned at the
front/top of the list).
> > 4. A whole bunch of modules are manually loaded into the kernel, is
> > there a reason for this (not a big thing, but looks wrong). Did I do
> > something wrong with modconf ?
> >
>
> I think this is just the "general use" kernel. I've always
> recompiled mine. Hardware selection should be replaced with
> good hardware detection, so that you only load up what you
> need.
Yeh I've planned on compiling my own, but I wanted to experience the
"one true way" for a bit first (well before I break things).
> > 5. So the computer rebooted for the first or second time or whatever,
> > and it was supposed to have installed everything. Yeh right... bits of
> > gnome were missing (gdm I remember specifically because when I
> > manually installed/started it it didn't run a window manager). The
>
> Was a window manager installed?
Yep, twm was installed by default and I'd manually apt-get install'd
sawfish (I saw someone else complaining of the same problem a couple
of days ago).
> > ispell language was set to spanish and english/american hadn't been
> > installed (the look dictionary was on german and also didn't have
> > either english or american installed).
>
> Now this I don't have a clue about. Mine always installed
> english
It might have been because I decided to install the
spanish/german/polish (Ie. all the languages) stuff that it just
didn't ask me about english at some point.
> > Traceroute was missing (I had traceroute6 though... gee thanks).
>
> /usr/sbin/traceroute
I'm not sure, does the below match with yours ? (I had to manually
install traceroute package later).
# dpkg -S /usr/sbin/traceroute
traceroute: /usr/sbin/traceroute
# dpkg -S /usr/bin/traceroute6
netbase: /usr/bin/traceroute6
> > 6. There is nothing like rpmfind, eventually I worked out how to do
> > grep's over /var/state/apt/lists/* to do what I want but it's still
> > annoying.
>
> Try apt-find.
# dpkg -S apt-find
dpkg: *apt-find* not found.
# apt-get install apt-find
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package apt-find
> > 7. xemacs with gnus with tm doesn't work at all (Ie. "xemacs -f gnus"
> > dies on load if you have configured gnus to use tm).
> >
>
> Don't know about this either. Just messed with emacs last night
> for the first time (I like vi).
I'm guessing that emacs works properly and it's just xemacs that's
broken.
> > 8. After getting the network and ppp setup I diald up the modem (I'm
> > ona static modem that's dialid up 24/7 and I'd bee AOL for about 14
> > hours at this point).
>
> AOL?
I meant AWOL, typo, Absent Without Leave. Eg. all my email comes
straight to my smtp box so it's not good to be off the 'net for long
periods.
> > 9. /etc/network/interfaces doesn't support aliases very well, copy
> > and paste is your friend but (to be fair RH might be just as bad).
>
> Don't know here either (seems like I'm not being very helpful).
As I said this is a minor problem, but for instance if you want 3 ips
on your machine you have to do...
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255
iface eth0:1 inet static
address 10.0.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255
iface eth0:2 inet static
address 10.0.0.3
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255
When something like...
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255
iface eth0 alias 1
address 10.0.0.2
iface eth0 alias 2
address 10.0.0.3
...would be so much easier to deal with (I've got about 8 aliases on
my machine and that's going to go up).
> > 10 dpkg -S isn't as good as rpm -qf in many cases, and things like rpm
> > -qif have to be done with multiple commands.
>
> I've personally never had problems.
# dpkg -S ./traceroute6
dpkg: *./traceroute6* not found.
Is kind of annoying, it gets even worse for symlinks. The main point
is the second one though. You have to do...
# dpkg -S bin/traceroute6 | cut -d: -f1 | xargs dpkg -s
...also don't try the above with say "xemacs" or "ls".
And the same is true for the dpkg -L stuff, so I generally end up
remembering which package something belongs to until I'd done looking
at it.
> Yeah, there are a lot of times that apt-get install just
> seems to be so great.
And "apt-get source <blah>" is very nice as well :) ... and upgrade
but I think I'm preaching to the choir here :).
> Well, some of your complaints were subjective, but I do
> see how a lot of this could be frustrating. It's obvious
> that grandma couldn't install Debian. It is a bit rougher
> than RH or SuSE. None of my installs have had any problems,
> and I've talked to quite a few who haven't had any either.
>
> I'm glad that you posted with such detail. Maybe someone
> read your post, and took action on shoring up some
> of your complaints. I know that there are some in the
> Debian community who don't want grandma to install it,
> but those elitist few don't speak for everyone.
>
> I personally don't have the raw coding talent to do much
> at this point about it. I'm glad that you are willing to
> help. I still stand by my point that there isn't anything
> in the Debian install (1.3 + 2.1 anyway) that can't be
> overcome with a bit of patience, and some reading.
This I'd more or less agree with, you can get through it with
patience, it's just that with most other distros now you don't need it
and you'll probably easily make the time up that you spent on
installing when your running it ... but you have to not give up at the
install phase first -- and the article that started all this suggested
that people probably won't.
--
James Antill -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If we can't keep this sort of thing out of the kernel, we might as well
pack it up and go run Solaris." -- Larry McVoy.
