Don't use dselect! (was Re: [plug] Installing Debian)

[Peter Wright]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 02:12:46PM +0800, Simon Scott (SSC) wrote:
> My server runs on debian, but personally Ive almost had enough of debian
> and dselect.
[ snip ]
> So once it has timed out, I set the mtu on eth0, and fire up dselect.

I think that is your major mistake. :-)

I've been using debian linux on all my (linux) home machines (about five at
last count) and one of my work machines in the past three years and since
apt-get became usable (sometime in the last couple of years) I haven't used
dselect once. Not once.

For a long time, dselect was regarded as a serious pain, because, well...
it just is! Strictly speaking, it does everything it's supposed to do, but
it does it in a way that drives new users insane (and quite a lot of old
users too).

If you remember just one thing about modern debian, it should be:
DON'T USE DSELECT.

Compare to console-apt[0].

# console-apt

Shows a list of available packages. I press 'u' to update ('?' for help -
there's not that many keys to learn (and you can also use the menus if you
like, though I never do)). Press 't' to play tetris while you wait for the
update (which will of course take longer if you've got a slow link or
you've got an unnecessary number of sources in your /etc/apt/sources.list).

Okay, now you're updated. Do a search for 'apache'.

/apache

and scroll through the available apache packages. There's six that I can
see - apache, apache-common, apache-dev, apache-doc, apache-perl and
apache-ssl. Nothing about php. Okay, search for 'php'.

/php

Okay, let's see what happens if we install the php3 package. Hit space to
select, then 'c' to "complete pending install/removals". You'll then see a
list of what other packages are required by php3 - in this case just
apache-common. Okay, fine. Hit 'c' again to start downloading them - once
downloaded they'll just be installed as per usual.

It may turn out that you'll need another package - I'm guessing the
php3-cgi package that was listed just under php3, but just try and see.
I often use console-apt just to find a package name (though there are other
ways to do this) - once I've got the name, I use apt-get from the prompt to
do the download/install, eg.:

# apt-get install php3-cgi

Just a matter of what you prefer. console-apt is pretty and colourful, but
sometimes I don't feel in a mood for pretty colours. :)

Hope that helps somewhat.

Pete.

[0] If you don't have console-apt, then:

# apt-get update ; apt-get install console-apt

should fix that for you. :)
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

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