Re: [Sheflug] Debian dselect...

[Guennadi Liakhovetski <nospam [at] ragingbull.com>]

On Mon, 14 May 2001, Matthew Palmer wrote:

> On Sun, 13 May 2001, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> 
> > > On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 12:39:04AM +0100, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> > > > uninstall particular packages, I run dselect... 
> > > 
> > > Ah, yes. There's the mistake, right there :)
> 
> Agreed.  dselect sucks.  apt-get on the command line rocks.

Well, I am not arguing with this, I am quite happy using apt-get or
whatever from the command line... Simply enough, knowing nothing about
Debian, I read various READMEs, install guides, etc., and they pointed me
to dselect. And anyway, I think, when your system is already up and
running, you can use apt-get (or rpm -i) to (un)install individual
packages. But when you want to look through all packages installed /
available and (un)install a few packages at one go... Something like
dselect / yast / ... might be helpful.

> > Well... I can't interpret it otherwise... Here's a sample line:
> >   n* Std admin    ncurses-term <none>      5.0-6      Additional terminal type
> > and in status line (when this line is hilighted:
> > ncurses-term not installed ;  install (was: new package).  Standard
> 
> Aha.  This looks as though it wants to install it but you haven't selected
> the [I]nstall option from the main menu.  Try that, see what happens.

Yep, as I mentioned before, there were 3 stages: 1) base system,
2) selecting groups of packages (like networking, C-development, etc. -
can't seem to find what programme that was?) - after this step some
installation DID happen, 3) running dselect with a few packages
pre-selected.

> The Debian "base package" (the 15MB tarball it sucked across before it
> rebooted) contains a complete filesystem that contains a good 15 or 20
> packages - enough to get you started (through the initial reboot and into
> <shudder> dselect).  Those are probably what you're seeing.

Hm, no, dselect doesn't show base packages, so you don't uninstall them by
chance:-) Those installed after stages 1 and 2 packages could be seen with
dpkg -l (I think). Anyway, after letting dselect install all those
packages, and then adding / removing some (couldn't remove some seemingly
useless packages - dselect would resist strongly...), the system is up and
running and already managed to compile a kernel for itself!:-) So, my
current setup is: Compaq P-133 24M RAM, 1G SCSI hd running Debian-2.2r0 
under the desk connected with a coaxial cable to P-75 with 48M RAM, 1.5G
ATA hd, running SuSE-7.0 with X, ppp, serving as a gateway, router and a
firewall (sure I screwed up some settings for the firewall /
ipchains... first time installing this stuff. Yes, I had to use 2.2(.16)
kernel, I know, there's a security bug fixed in 2.2.19, but can't upgrade 
yet...). Demn cool!:-) I guess I'll have to run some security test...

> From there, you
> should probably configure your package sources (edit /etc/apt/sources.list

Aha, so, you can do batch-(un)installation with apt-* too?...

> if you're feeling adventurous - let me know where you're getting your
> packages from (CD, FTP, HTTP, NFS, whater) and I'll hack up some appropriate
> lines for you) and then run apt-get update.  When that finishes
> successfully, then you can start installing more packages.

I used NFS to my another machine's CD-ROM. No, I couldn't simply
re-connect it to the Debian one, Compaq Deskpro XL 5133 wouldn't allow you
to connect an IDE CD-ROM alone without an IDE-disk and booting to SCSI...

Thanks to all!
Guennadi
___

Dr. Guennadi V. Liakhovetski
Department of Applied Mathematics
University of Sheffield, U.K.
email: G.Liakhovetski [at] sheffield.ac.uk



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