On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Barney Wrightson wrote:
>Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> I'm trying to install debian 3.0 (woody) from CD to my Athlon PC. The
>> installation program fails to find my hard drive (which other
>> (commercial) distributions have located variously at /dev/hdg and
>> /dev/hde).
>> The problem seems to be that my (sole) hard drive is _not_ on the primary
>> IDE controller. It is on a secondary controller because this latter
>> works at ATA-100 speed.
[ .... ]
>Which boot image are you using? I assume it is "vanilla" off of the 1st
>CD. Try using "bf24" (boot off of cd 5 I think - or you can choose it
>somehow off of CD 1) and see if that works. I have an Asus A7V which has
>a secondary Promise ATA-100 controller onboard, and I am pretty sure it
>was detected automatically when I used the bf24 boot image to install.
Yes, bf24 is just the business. THANK YOU!
After a pleasant 3 hours this afternoon, I've managed a trial
installation on a spare 1Gig partition. It's excellent to have found,
for instance, Emacs 20 as well as Emacs 21 available.
I've still got to get my screen set up properly (with framebuffer), to
give me a decent screen resolution. I've still got to configure X (for
the few programs I want that need it). I've still got to configure my
ISP connection properly. I'll probably want to build a kernel. But,
what the heck? Another 5 or 6 hours, and I'll be there.
By the way, what does bf24 stand for? Presumably the "24" means kernel
2.4, but what about the "bf"? "big friendly", perhaps?
<off-topic rant>
Whew! _What_ a relief to have a halfway decent installation program
after battling for around 20 hours with SuSE's yast2. What do these guys
in Nuremberg think they're playing at? yast1 might not have been lovely,
but at least it was usable. yast2 is suitable only for the
point-and-click brigade who're not too worried about fine details, like
how their hard drives are partitioned, or what software is installed. It
drove me to distraction. I'm _NOT_ prepared to use a mouse-driven GUI
installation program, particularly one which flickers horribly at 60Hz on
my 17" CRT, and even worse is the clueless mechanical way they made it
into a "keyboard-driven" program by simulating mouse movements by
arbitrarily long repeated <tab> thumping. In each screen of the
installation program, the <alt> key combinations were different,
sometimes <CR> went to the next screen, sometimes it went into a
subscreen of the current one. Then for the critical bit (the package
selection screen) they put the help-window (about 25 characters narrow)
on the left, and the package descriptions (about 45 characters narrow) on
the right, so that you had to horizontally scroll EACH PACKAGE
DESCRIPTION (yes folks, all 4k of them) to decide whether to install it
or not. Then you select a package, only to find that the <alt>S (or
whatever it was) has taken the keyboard focus away from the package list,
so you have to thump <tab> 5 or 6 times to get back there again. It used
to take me about 2½ hours to go through SuSE's packages, selecting what I
want. With yast2, it would probably take about 40 hours. No thanks.
OK, I'm 80 Euros down for SuSE 8.0, but my time and sanity's worth a lot
more than that. Cheerio, SuSE!
<\off-topic rant>
>HTH
It did!
>Barney.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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