Testing debian to see if it meets my requirements for installation on a few servers to replace RedHat 6.1 & 6.2. I am a very happy RedHat user except it installs too many items like X that are unecessary for a server & nearly impossible to remove after the fact.
After reading about the other distro's merits I downloaded debian potato (this process needs to be be easier for new users, but I recognize that from this point on if I need a new release I won't have to download an entire distibution) and did the install which went OK, and was infact easier than the comments I had read suggested it was going to be. I then wanted to compile a kernel to meet the machine requirements, and not use modules. I must have built a million kernels (well a few hundred anyway) over the years so this is NOT a new process to me. OK so the kernel sources are not installed by default, so I figure out dselect and install the sources, unpack them & run make menuconfig I get - curses.h: No such file or directory. I rerun dselect and check that ncurses and ncurses-devel are installed and they are but this file is not there? So I try to run make xconfig, this goes OK until I do make bzImage and now I get .../sched.h:557 Internal compiler error in 'emit_move_insn_1 at expr .c:2759 It appears to me that it is not possible to build a new kernel with a stable release of debian. I don't have the time to debug broken software, I expected that basic stuff like this would work without a problem on any release. Comments or suggestions welcome but it looks like I have wasted my time and should have stayed with RH
