Hello Debian debuggers,
I gave my first try to Debian after installing Slackware
systems for nearly 2 years. Although I did prefer the Debian directory
structure and help files I remain rather disappointed with the rest.
The following applies to my trial with v0.93R6 on a 133MHz, 32Mb PCI
with EIDE HD machine.
* The base disks do not contain vi. This is unacceptable.
* I definitely did not read all READMEs but, well, I had dd the debian
1440 base disks directly without gunzipping them beforehand. Debian
was not able to recognize them :-(
* Debian did not recognize my D-Link DE-530CT ethernet card with the
de-4x5 driver (Slackware has no problem with this).
* Ahhh, I had left out the PPP option and the whole system stayed
hanging at boot-up trying to initialise a serial connection. Debian
is silly...
* Debian should check for the existence and show its contents to the
user of /etc/init.d/network before updating. Debian appended data to
the file and screwed things up...
* Debian should ask from the start what keyboard I use and react
accordingly . (Hint: Slackware does that, why not Debian?)
* It was not possible to format a diskette using the installation
program :-(
Overall: I haven't been much further than base installation (I hoped I
could ftp the rest of Debian to the root directory before going
on). The installation program interface looks nice and clean but has a
long way to go before being as convenient as Slackware's Setup.
Cheers,
-T.Netter
CNRS National Center for Scientific Research, France
