ok thanks very much Jeff and chesty, apt-cache was the magic
command I was looking for.
I didn't run dselect on purpose, it was part of installing.
I picked the "advanced" installation option first off,
and got presented with millions of questions and crap
so I went back and picked "simple".
The result was too simple!
I was missing most of what I consider to be a complete
system.
And regarding elm, when it wouldn't compile I played with
mutt instead and quite like it so might stick with that.
I heard the debian install is much more user-friendly
these days, and I guess it wasn't too bad but jeeze it
has required a fair bit of adding extra packages and
customising to get what I want.
Maybe it's easier if you do a gui install?
dunno, I've only got a pathetic monitor connected for
installing it, after that it will run headless.
(I can't help comparing it to a recent install of solaris 8
I did: boot off cd, answer questions on hostname, IP addr,
timezone etc (probably a dozen all up), layout disk
(optional step), pick distribution (entire, workstation,
core system etc) and go away for half an hour)
There's a few oddities though, eg. I got exim as a MTA.
I couldn't work out how to configure it properly (well
I can't get it going from fiddling with the conf file
and reading the man page, so I gave up). So I installed
postfix instead but can't remove exim without also
removing leafnode and other stuff I want to keep.
Doesn't really matter, but it's extra crap on the system
I'd rather not have there.
But despite a few relatively minor hassles, I like it.
Dave.
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