Greetings list, Last week, at the Usenix conference, I received a free CD copy of Debian 1.3. The CD is labeled with Novare' on it, if that matters.
Anyway, I figured it was time to rebuild my current Linux system. I am running Red Hat's version 3.0.3 that has been upgraded and patched with both RPMs and manual software builds, etc. I did a safe thing, brought the box to single user mode and did two tars to my 8mm drive. One tar was of the /home partition and the other tar was of everything except the home partition and the /proc system. I am glad I did those backups as you will read later. I merrily read some of the quick READMEs and made my boot floppy. I cross my fingers issue the shutdown command from my old faithfully running system and wait while the reboot happens. All is good so far. Debian boots from the floppy and starts asking me relevant installation questions. I go ahead and reformat checking for bad blocks my /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 (and /dev/sda4 - swap) partitions. Things go smoothly up until now. The system does some work and reboots if I remember correctly, ultimately I end up at the Dselect tool screen. I was really feeling confident because the install was working well. This is where things started to get interesting. Dselect displayed a large list of packages, and had some recommended for installation others were not marked for installation. I understand that. I looked at the packages and figured, what the heck and Dselect do its thing. It read many packages from my cd-rom and a bit of time later wanted a reboot (I think). I then started Dselect again this time choosing packages such as Sendmail (to replace smail) and a few others. The Dselect tool was quite confusing and was not easy for me to figure out with regards to packages already installed. I saw numerous "*", "-", "_", etc. I read the help pages but they were sorely lacking good solid information. I thought to myself, this can't be that hard. I have been running Linux for a while now and can hobble together my missing packages like X later after I get the networking ironed out, etc. Well.. To make a long and windy email message more concise I will say that I spent more time fiddling with dip (to get my static IP slip stuff working) and had loads of trouble. Feeling plenty depressed I resorted to recovering my old working system from those two tar tapes I made. Many hours later the system was back to its old state. The real question I pose after all of this dribble is, has Dselect been revised or changed with the advent of 1.3.1 or 2.0? I think I can get over the changes in how the /etc/rc.d/ startup scripts behaviour as compared to Red Hat linux (at least the version of RH that I was running) and the other small oddities, but what I am hoping for is possible a more user intuitive package tool. Now, I was REALLY impressed by the installation tool when it installed Sendmail, asking me for relevant information about my mail setup. I do not think that Red Hat offers that (and asking those questions and doing a config of the software is a good thing) and its little gems like that that are keeping me interested in Debian as opposed to rushing out and getting RHh 5.1.x and setting it up. Thanks for letting me take your time to ramble and vent a bit. I do really hope some work is under way with regards to a more polished Dselect. Thanks, Rod Rod Troch N2ZVV | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Don't mess with TEXAS. http://www.texas.com/ | ftp://lonestar.texas.com/ | FTP for PGP key -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
