On Wednesday 06 Mar 2002 2:25 am, Corrin Lakeland wrote: > Firstly, stable vs woody. We recently had a thread on -devel where we > concluded that ordinary users are best running testing. You can't complain > they have a hard time installing testing when that is what we tell them to > run. Yes the installation CDs may be fscked, but it sounds like the > problems Harry had were to do with installation in general and the CDs > didn't get in the way to me.
Install using potato cd's, upgrade to woody afterwards is the way to go. It's a bit premature to start slagging off the woody install cd's when it hasn't even released yet. > After plugging everything in I was relieved to see lilo come up and things > seemed to be booting fairly well. Suddenly a kernel panic came on screen, > whoops :-(. I rebooted and picked one of my older kernels from lilo ... X > fails to start but I get a login prompt. For those interested, after a bit > of experimentation with recompiling the kernel I've found the K7 option > seems to cause problems. OK, so you had problems with a self rolled kernel. What's that got to do with the pre-built kernels that will eventually ship on the woody cd ? > My next problem was getting X and the modem working. I've got an ISA modem > which I've been using on IRQ 4 at 3F8, I found it worked more reliably than > a PCI winmodem. pon resulted in the required beeping noises, much to my > relief, but /var/log/messages informed me my serial line wasn't clear with > bit 7 set to zero. Repeated attempts failed at different stages, once even > managing to connect. wvdial claimed not to be able to find the modem at > all. Do you realise just how hard it is to do _anything_ in debian without > access to the net? I wasn't able to get documentation or install useful > looking packages. After a while I guessed an IRQ conflict with the bios, > disabled the built in serial ports and the net came up. Good old ISA... There is usually a lot of docs on the cd's. apt-get install doc-linux-html lynx . Read the Modem How-To. > Next was X. Something with the framebuffer was working since I had a > penguin coming up on startup. According to the motherboard's manual I had > a via chipset which is uses some trident blade chip. However X autodetect > refused to find my mouse (PS2)... Eventually I worked out that for some > reason .devfsd had dissapeared so devfsd wasn't loaded, and so my mouse > device didn't exist. Framebuffer ? devfsd ? Aren't these marked *experimental* in your kernel config ? What you choose to include in your kernel is your business. I just don't see the connection with the woody install process.... > Unfortunatly, booting X resulted in lockups and similar. I had carefully > set things like 640x480 resolution with a low referesh rate to avoid this. > It turned out to be a bug in the video card's driver and required manually > disabling X extensions in the XF86-Config file. I grant you X installation could be easier, but it is already a lot easier than X3.3. Progress is being made. Are you sure your problems were not related to running a framebuffer ? > Sound required a number of attempts at recompiling the kernel and I still > don't have ALSA or arts working. Again ALSA is not in the 2.4.x series kernel. It will be in 2.6. How is this Debian's fault ? Could you have got your sound card going with a pre-built kernel by selecting the appropiate OSS/Kernel modules ? > Anyway, my point is that installing Debian is a nightmare compared to > anything else. Compare the leaps and bounds that system ease-of-use has > gone through over the past two years, and then look at the installation > process. I know there are projects working on this, but they aren't here > yet, so I think Harry's point is fair. I like the level of control the current install method gives. Should the day arrive that we have some flash graphical automatic installer, I hope it will be an alternative rather than a replacement. > PS: Not that installing XP is any better. The one time I did that I had to > rip every single piece of hardware out of the machine to get it to install, > and then add them back one by one. Without ripping anything out, the > installer either hangs or leaves the system unbootable. So much for flash graphical installers.... Simon Hepburn.
