[plug] ComputerBank meeting Tues 24th 7:45pm

[Peter Wright]

On Thu, Aug 19, 1999 at 02:09:56PM +0800, Christian wrote:
> 
> > I have yet to fully grasp the Debian install and would like to see
> > how it is done a few times.
[ ... ]
> In all seriousness, what is it exactly that people have problems
> with when installing Debian?  Is it dselect or something else?  I'll
> admit dselect as intimidating the first time I tried to use it (at
> least until I read the instructions...) but other than that, I don't
> remember Debian being vastly different to the others.

As far as I recall, I think the Redhat install uses colour liberally,
whereas the Debian install doesn't (seriously, I think this does make
a difference, even if it's only psychological). I think the Debian
install also requires you to manually select the kernel modules you
want to use, whereas the Redhat install doesn't.

Oh, and yes, dselect is a steaming pile of painful poo.

(now isn't _that_ a nice image :))

dselect almost put me off using Debian completely when I first tried
to install it (previously I was a Slackware user)... Was I trying to
do something particularly complicated? Well, I wanted to install
xemacs but not emacs.  That's all. However, dselect almost drove me
insane, every time I tried to include a particular emacs/xemacs
package, it would say "oh no no no, you need emacs for that, I'll just
add emacs to your list of packages to install, aren't I helpful" ...
and I had to try to convince it otherwise.