[plug] The Debian Experience

[Leon Brooks]

Well, it's been a while since I've done a Debian install from scratch.

 * Dselect still sucks. (-:

 * The partitioning step sucks big time - there is no way I'd ever
   expose Joe Sixpack to a raw Debian install - and may of the screens
   would be total terror to a newbie. Asking someone to press F3 and
   scan ugly text full of buzzwords to discover that they need to
   start the install by typing the cryptic `bf24' command if they want
   a modern system is a bit rough by today's standards.

 * I can see why Deb-heads like network installs so much, because
   installing from CDs sucks; for example, the setup script makes you
   feed in each CD that you want to install from so that it can spend
   time reading index files from it - a better plan would be to collate
   copies of the index files for a set onto a single CD (maybe the
   last in the set?) - all before you even begin to install `real'
   packages. Apt-get doesn't remember which CD is in, nor does it sniff
   and see if the CD is one of those it needs before it asks for a
   particular CD to be inserted, please press Enter.

 * I did like a language screen containing *just* a lit of `press enter
   here to start installing in $LANGUAGE' in the individual languages
   including ideograms and other squiggles and *not* defaulting to
   English, but wish you could get same up at boot rather than having
   to parse English to get to it (mitigated by the fact that a simple
   Enter key stroke will get you there, albeit with a 2.2 kernel).

 * It is *much* better at cutting the crap than any of the RPM-based
   distros that I've tried (Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, Caldera) - a full
   gateway machine with all of the server fruit, bells and whistles
   that I wanted came out at roughly 140MB, on Mandrake this would be
   600-700MB. In today's world of 40GB on up hard disks, it seems
   ludicrously parsimonious [-: polysyallabic paradise there :-].

 * The full set of 7 CDs is awe-inspiring, even asking for relatively
   obscure stuff like x2x and lbxproxy never took me past the 3rd CD
   which makes me curious about the mysterious depths of esoterica
   encysted on CD #7...

 * The graphics etc useage of the installer is very light; I could
   imagine running it on a 386/33 and still having hair when I
   finished installing.

 * Apt-get does some handy things like semi-automatically tossing exim
   over its shoulder to make room for postfix.

 * It prefers PostgreSQL to MySQL. (-: Cue DB religious wars :-)

 * While said questions could be tres confusing for a newbie, the
   configuration steps ask many intelligent questions which give an
   experienced user a fairly good depth of control.

More to come after I've been using it for a while. (-:

Cheers; Leon