On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 03:58, Hubert Chan wrote: > >>>>> "Billie" == Billie Mulcahy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Billie> Debian is hard to install. ... > > Could you tell us what you found hard about the install? > > Personally, I have never found it hard to install. The only thing I > found was that you had to know what hardware you had, to pick out the > right modules if they were needed. (Hopefully this will be better with > the hardware autodetect in the new d-i.) But then again, I had > installed SLS from a huge stack of floppies back in the day. > > So I am wondering what exactly it is that people find hard about the > Debian installer.
Speaking from limited experience. The graphical configurator xf86cfg that is used in Woody is such a useless heap of shit that I suspect that it must have been donated by Microsoft. By useless heap of shit I mean that it actually does nothing, you can move from button to button to invoke some action but nothing at all happens. There was a graphics config program in Potato that was a bit painful but it did at least work though I do not recall the name of it. FWIW program with the same interface is used in Slackware to this day. It's not hard to work around the useless thing. xf86config is a text based configurer that generates a XF86Config file that will need to be renamed afterward to XF86Config-4 if using XFree86 version 4.1 the default for Woody. I found that worked with nvidia chipsets using the nv driver. For S3Trio chipsets that often turn up on older hardware, it is necessary to install the xserver-s3 package because the vesa driver is broken for S3Trio in XFree86 version 4.1 . Apart from that, many things work better in Debian than other distros. pppconfig for one thing is much better than the KPPP in Fedora for just one example. Just my 2 bits Bob Parker
