Ethan Benson wrote:
> well frankly you need to know the fscking network numbers before going
> to setup a computer on the network, if you don't know what your
> network numbers are that can hardly be blamed on debian. dammit Jim
> im an installer not a psychic!
:-)
> and you can redo the `setup the network' step as many times as you
> want before rebooting the box, and console 2 is there so you can do a
> quick test (i think ping is there).
But apt starts after the reboot, so you can't just redo that step when apt
fails. And you have to know about console 2, and remember that it's
sometimes good to check things before rebooting...
Okay, a workaround: insert a "Test the network configuration" step, you give
it an address to ping and it gives back x/10 successes (or something like
that). Problem solved?
The real question of course is: how easy should the install process be? The
Debian answer seems to be something like "As easy as our volunteers have time
for." Since all of us user/maintainers already have everything installed,
and can use the working-if-not-friendly install process perfectly well to
bring up new machines, there's not much incentive to improve things, so the
boot floppies always get put off and done in a somewhat minimalist way
(IMHO). Then we get slammed in the press for being impossible to use, so far
fewer people use it than perhaps should- though this does keep the list
traffic down. :-)
So what if there were some company with a commercial interest in writing a
high-quality installer for Debian? Then they'd hire people to put in lots of
time to make it nice and friendly, like letting people easily reconfigure the
network after apt fails. And if they were *real* nice about it, they'd make
it free so we could use it too...
Oh wait, there is such a company, and they just released version 1.0 of their
woody-based distribution!
So, has anyone looked into using the Progeny installer on PPC?
-Adam P.
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