[TAG] Debian Installation

[John Karns]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting John Karns (johnkarns at gmail.com):
>
> My _personal_ general attitude was always that such programs cause way
> too many problems and (e.g.) inexplicably hangs because some option ROM
> was poked the wrong way, so I thought it A Very Good Thing for those to
> not be installed and activated by default.
>
> Now that such things _are_ tending to be installed by default, in the
> event of trouble, you have to abort and try again in "expert" mode so
> that you can disable them.

That conjures the thought of having a menu option or a prompt in Ubuntu's
text install mode, to bypass the probing.


>> <chuckle> While I offer kudos for his sense of humor, I'm lazy enough to
>> prefer not having to drudge through what would probably be several days of
>> having to sift through individual package installs (for someone who is a
>> new or relatively new Debian user) to arrive at having a "comfortable"
>> system configuration.[1]
>
> I'm guessing you slogged through the ancient boot-floppies installer of
> yesteryear, possibly getting bogged down in the swamp that is the
> dselect program, like a lot of us old-timers.  That's been pretty much
> just a bad memory for the last couple of years.

Yeah, I was thinking mostly of the Sarge install I tried a couple of years
back.  The install completed without a problem, but then when I was
confronted by the thought of having to go through setting up / tuning X to
get from wherever the install had left it to where I envisioned having it,
I decided that I'd try something else.


>> While I've gone through doing it with other distros in the past, I
>> think Ubuntu offers a nice shortcut to getting a Debian based up and
>> running in a very short time.  Now if they just had an ISO tailored
>> for [56]86 architectures instead of the more vanilla 386.
>
> Pentium and PPro-optimized kernels are one apt-get command (or, if you
> insist, aptitude, synaptic, or what-have-you) away, on Ubuntu.  Less so
> for other packages, but you're dreaming if you think significant gains
> can be made there.

Since the Linux kernel has reached the maturity level it currently has
with the 2.6 series, I find myself twiddling the configuration a lot less
frequently than I remember doing in years past, but I'm still partial to
running a stock kernel which I've compiled myself.  So I was referring to
the packaged binaries.

In most situations the difference is probably just academic, but in some
cases, e.g., "transcode", where one is dealing with long, CPU intensive
processes, the difference becomes a practical one.  This is where the
Gentoo users have an edge.  Although must say that I don't find the
thought of compiling Open Office, KDE, etc. very entertaining either.


>> [1] For an environment which will serve as a system for general personal
>> use, I find myself installing numerous development libraries, as well as
>> both KDE And Gnome to support running various multimedia apps, the ability
>> to compile things like "transcode" (which demanded a lot of schlepping for
>> auxiliary packages right there), etc anyway, so that tends to cancel out
>> the advantage of carefully choosing the package set during install for me
>> anyway.
>
> Even before they got rid of boot-floppies, the Debian people already
> offered a choice of _either_ the dselect swamp or the "tasksel"
> metapackage (package groups) picker, for the latter part of
> installation.  "tasksel" was described as the "simple package selection"
> choice in the install screens, if memory serves.


Sometime in the future I'll have to try find some time to try a more
recent Debian release to see where I might end up with it.  I tend to
envision taking the approach of doing a lighter weight install, then
filling it out using a tool like synaptic or adept.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that although a distro like
Ubuntu or $PICK-A-DISTRO-AIMED-AT-NEWBIES may have it's origins in being
designed for the non-geek users out there who are looking to replace the
more ubiquitous family of OS's, the easier installs and the ready-to-use
configuration can also provide a choice for more convenience for some of
the more experienced users too.