[H-GEN] Debian install

[Anthony Towns]

Hello world,

I'm writing this with dselect running in the background. I'm using elm and vi
rather than my standard Pine configuration, and I hence haven't got my 
automagic spelling, grammar, allusion, allegory, alliteration and analogy
filters set up yet. Hopefully the sheer pleasure of having azure up and running
should let me fake it well enough.

Anyway, since I was a little vague on what you needed to do to get a debian
system from woe [1] to go. So I thought I'd post a clarification to the list
for anyone in a similar situation.

Pointe, the first: debian does _not_ require sixty-five billion froppy disks 
to install. If you've got a system with an IDE or SCSI CD-ROM drive, it 
doesn't even require _one_. The disks that you _can_ use are:
	a boot/rescue disk -- to boot into Linux
	a drivers disk -- to access proprietry (sound card based) CD-ROMs
	five base disks -- if you don't have a CD-ROM
	a boot disk -- once you've partitioned, if you don't like LILO

Pointe, the second: debian is remarkably automatic. Every time you finish 
something, it checks to see where it's up to (eg "okay, you just formatted
a disk. Are there any more to format? Yes? Okay, so you might want to do 
that again; or you might want to mount one of these disks that have already
been formatted but we haven't touched yet [2]; or we could go on") which 
takes all of about ten seconds (on a 486sx33 -- damn you and your hosebeast,
Jason) and comes pretty close to saving you from having to think at all. 

Pointe, the third: it's not just user friendly, it's downright chummy. And
polite, too.  "Are you online now? If so, I'd like to refresh the newsgroup 
descriptions.  May I?" (slnr) How many installation programs do you know 
that (who?) tell you they're "Pondering." ("this is ponderous, man. Really
ponderous") when you finish telling them what options you want enabled? How 
many times do you get to choose to "demote american" ? (ispell-british after
installing ispell-american)  

Pointe, the fourth: I _hate_ ae(1) and tiny-elvis(1). And when I say hate I
don't just mean in that "don't you just hate it when the last thing you type
before closing your telnet connection is 'su -c "nohup rm -rf / & killall 
pppd"'", I mean in the sense that I'd rather be using pico(1).

Pointe, the fifth: pine(1) and pico(1) aren't on the CD. No, I don't understand
it either. Neither's PGP, due to export restrictions. Getting around both of
those annoyances is achieved by the simple method of pointing dselect at the
official ftp site (read: the Oz mirror of sunsite, for pine and similar), and
progsoc.its.edu.au (the UofTas IIRC, for PGP and other "munitions").

Pointe, the sixth: having been given the task to write a recursive grep program
yesterday for CS228 (Systems Programming, ie C and Unix) I was less surprised
than I might have been to find a package called rgrep. Guess what it does.

Pointe, the seventh: the apache installation credits the authors of each of the
support modules you can install. Another option for those of you seeking fame
as well as fortune.

Pointe, the eighth: unlike the 1.2 installation, 1.3 asks you almost as soon
as you log in to root for the first time whether you'd like shadow passwords
setup. I was a little surprised to see the prompt [Y/n] instead of [Y/y].

Pointe, the ninth: qmail doesn't _seem_ to have a .deb file!?! I cannot 
comprehend this. Hell, /etc/passwd even contains `qmail[dsrqlp]' by default!
Still, I've got smail ("the route-addr hits...") installed instead of 
sendmail like I used to, so that's presumably some sort of improvement
security-wise, at least. 

Pointe, the a'th: I _hate_ tiny-elvis. What's the deal with not being able
to /dl/ the last letter in a line? Ever seen vi core dump [3]. I have.
*grumble*.

Pointe, the b'th: what's the deal with man's behaviour with multiple matches
under Linux? 'q' for next?!? If Solaris can get it right (:n, just like usual)
why can't Linux?

Pointe, the c'th: try to select all the files you want the first time through
when you're installing from CD. It looks at every damn package and decides
whether it should be installed or not rather than just looking for the ones
you know you damn well want. *grrr* It's painful with a double speed CD ROM.
Trust me.

Pointe, the d'th: there's a PPP setup program (dunc, dialup networking config)
but it's somewhat dodgy. It's restricted to one phone number and one account, 
and it's not particularly tidy. It seems to have a bug wrt mru and mtu, too.
It shouldn't have an "=", and it seemed to like repeating itself... Sheesh. 
And then it's got the sequence:
	pppd ... connect "chat ... < /tmp/wchatfile"    &
        rm -f /tmp/wchatfile
I'm sure our concurrency students can tell as the problem with _that_. And then
of course pppd decides to detach itself _anyway_... *mumble* And now of course
Prentice isn't answering it's phones, and... Tell me why we like the Internet
again?

Pointe, the e'th: it has "." in the default path! I'm disgusted. (and the
default prompt is ugly too. "azure$ _" Ick. Both are fixed now, and fortune(1)
is run at login, too.

Pointe, the f'th: don't try being too smart and having a small root drive and
thinking you'll stick everything elsewhere. I set mine to 10MB, of which 8MB is
now used. Thankfully I had 700MB left over, and /tmp's stuck on that. :)

Cheers,
aj [4] 

[1] ...and I don't think there's any other way to describe a system whose
    only functional OS is MessyDOS 6.2. It's sole saving grace was a CD-ROM
    driver and copies of Warcraft I and II.

[2] Thankfully the hard disk I installed DOS on and the hard disk containing
    /home were different. Unfortunately /var/spool/mail didn't survive. :(

[3] BTW, "ulimit -c unlimited" is the command to enable core dumping, and 
    "ulimit -c 0" is the command to disable. At least here. I'm _sure_ that
    didn't work last time I had to try it...
   
[4] Wahoo! I'm a sysadmin again. Accounts are open for bidding. (and while the 
    "a" may stand for "arbitrary", the "j" does _not_ stand for "just")
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