All, After using RedHat for several years, I'm finally fed up with their chronic ignoring of bug-reports from non-enterprise customers and the recent moves torwards per-seat licensing were the last straw...
I won't dwell upon what a horror my first Debian experience (woody) was, you've all heard it enough to motivate the new installer. Which is why I'm writing this. I screwed up my courage to take another chance at Debian, using the new netinst CD. This is definitely a good step forward, but there are some issues I wanted to report. Until I get comfortable with it, I begin by bringing up a new distro as a VMware guest running under a RedHat 8.0 host and all comments below are relative that environment. I opted for the 'test' (sarge) installation, since woody is hopelessly backlevel for almost anything I'd need to run: o Even though I had specified a small /boot partition during disk partitioning, Grub was incorrectly setting root to (hd1,1), which is my / partition. Edited command line from grub startup, then fixed /boot/grub/menu.lst accordingly. o The installer created /usr/X11R6/bin with 0700 permissions, which neatly prevented a non-root user from running anything X-related. Took quite a while to figure out what was going on. A simple chmod fixed it. o The base system does not probe for IDE devices, rendering the VMware CD-ROM device inaccessible. I had to manually modprobe ide-detect after booting. I'm unfamiliar with module configuration under Debian, so I'm not sure where to request that this be loaded on a persistent basis. o User KDE session cannot produce sound unless permissions for /dev/sequencer and /dev/dsp are changed to 0777. This also begs the question of why a GNU/Debian installer chooses KDE as the default (I didn't ask for it, and expected Gnome). o The default X display driver for VMware guests cannot properly render antialiased fonts, e.g. the main menubar popup shows all entries blank until the mouse is moved over them. Installing the latest VMware X driver from the VMware tools package fixed this, although their installation script hosed X completely until I renamed the original (which VMware modifies to XF86Config-4.BeforeVmware) back to XF86Config-4. This is certainly not a Debian issue, but it would be helpful to include a current display driver by default. o Line drawing characters do not seem available to 'mc' when run in konsole. Works fine from an xterm or rxvt window. I've never seem this in other KDE environments. I poked at the Debian bug report system, but couldn't fathom how or where to enter this feedback. Hopefully, sending it to this list is not too out of line. Steve -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
