Subject: installation notes

From: Sebastian Kuzminsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 18:20:56 -0600

Hello, i'm a new Debian convert.  I have been using the ftp method
of dselect to install and update Debian 1.1b on a few machines.  I
have a few questions and comments on the installation/maintenance
procedure.

   In all i am very happy with the quality of the Debian distribution.
The installation went very smoothly, and most of the few bugs/hickups
i found have since been fixed.

   The Packages files not always up to date.  This causes the dselect
tool to think version X of a particular package is available from the
ftp server, when in reality the package available is X+epsilon.  This
causes dselect to try to retrieve a non-existing file, and it fails.
   This in turn causes some dependencies to fail.

   For example, the Packages file in unstable/ currently thinks that
the available version of xforms is 0.80j-2, but the file present in
the unstable/binary/x11 directory is identified as version 0.80j-3.  

   A couple of packages are missing some of the install scripts.  For
example sudo.  Here is the installation error.  I guess this should
be directed to the maintainer of the sudo package?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Setting up sudo ...
dpkg (subprocess): unable to execute post-installation script: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing sudo (--install):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

   The default system init scripts have two shortcomings in my mind.

   kerneld should be started before ANYTHING else happens, with the
possible exception of a root filesystem check.  The reason for this
is that it may be needed to load binary-format modules, or
md-personalities, etc.  I had my system lock up during boot because
i have swap on a raid0 md device, and i compiled raid0 as a module.

   Also, "mdadd -ar" doesnt work.  The mdtools man pages are wrong.  
The workaround is to mdadd and mdrun each md-device individually.

   All in all i am very happy to have discovered the Debian
distribution.

Sebastian Kuzminsky
[email-masked]