On Mon, 11 Sep 2023 12:12:18 -0500 Bill Barry <waba...@gmail.com> dijo:
>> C'mon Debian people, don't you test this stuff? > >I don't see that installing from the Live OS is the recommended path >for installing Debian. The netinst method is one of the recommended >installation methods. I know that net install is more common. But if the Live ISO has a button on its main page that says 'Install Debian,' then it ought to work. I was not impressed in my installation experience with Debian 12 Bookworm. More follows. The continuing saga of a Live ISO install: I did finally get it installed. The Live ISO initially boots to a Grub menu, and one of the options is to boot to an 'Install' version. This version immediately went into installation, bypassing the need to deal with the worthless 'Install Debian' button. This presented more or less the same questions (time zone? language? etc.), but the screens asking these questions were different. Things still did not go well. When I got to how to partition the 20GB VirtualBox .vdi image I told it to create / of 6GB and the remainder for /home. It errored on formatting these partitions, claiming that the media could not be formatted. I spent an hour trying to get past partitioning, and finally succeeded when I went back to the beginning of the partitioning section and chose the option to let it just create one partition whatever way it wanted. Too many bugs in the 'manual' partition process. Finally it started copying files from the DVD, but after fifteen minutes or so it stopped and popped up an error message that the source refused to deliver data. I tried again, and after half an hour the mouse became locked to the guest so I couldn't do anything in the host, not even powering down the guest was possible. Eventually I decided the only way out was to use the computer's power button, killing everything. After rebooting the host I opened VirtualBox and proceeded with attempts to install Debian 12. I opened the Debian machine and tried again, and this time at about halfway through the Live ISO apparently had a power manager timeout and locked the screen, demanding my password to continue. At the very beginning I had told it to boot automatically without a password, so I had never created one. I couldn't get the screen unlocked, but the optical drive was still grinding and clucking along, so I let it sit. When the drive finally went silent I killed the VirtualBox window, and then rebooted. It came up complete without error messages, so evidently I had finally gotten it installed. The first thing I did was to turn off screen locking, and then I went on with configurations. I quickly needed to install some things, so I launched Synaptic, which popped up a little authentication window asking for my non-existent password. Eventually I discovered that if I left the password blank and just proceeded the Synaptic window came up anyway. Not the smoothest way to handle a user without a root password, but eventually it worked. The whole installation took about six hours, although maybe a third of that was because VirtualBox refused to boot from the USB drive, so I had to install from the much slower DVD. Another third or so was clunking around fixing failures to install. My main purpose in this exercise was to see if Debian 12 Bookworm would provide an alternative to my current Xubuntu 22.04.3, and a big part of the answer is determining if all the applications I need are available in the repos or otherwise; and if I can stay completely away from snaps. Xubuntu 22.04.3 is the host, so I can just pop back and forth to make sure I don't leave out any critical applications. It has been about three months since the Xfce Live ISO went public, and I'm not terribly impressed. Bugs happen, bad design decisions happen, and lots of other problems crop up, but three months after the public started downloading the ISO I would not have expected all the issues that I experienced. Admittedly, VirtualBox was responsible for some of them, like not being able to boot from the USB drive (which it does see). If Debian labels the Bookworm installation as 'not supported as a virtual machine,' that's a cop out and they can forget about me as a possible user. Nevertheless I did get it installed, and now it's on to figuring out if Debian 12 will really work for me. :)
