oooh, these LNO kids play rough... I don't think anyone's conceding anything now, every post is "well, in your rebuff to my rebuff of your earlier rebuff, you were wrong. Allow me to rebuff." Mind you, its very entertaining. Continue, by all means. I sense a nuclear style counter attack from strike, so brace yourselves.

oh, and long live newbies.

Oh all these posts...and I thought windows was the evil one.

Thank you, MasterC. That was the intent of my post. I explicitly said 'Now that I'm dual-booting Slack and Debian I can say I'd be using XP as my main system if I had started with Debian.' and directly specified 'I used Debian slightly longer than Mandrake - more than 24 hours'. So it's not like I'm hiding my inexperience or claiming to present an expert view. But Strike decided to graciously beat me over the head with that as though a person's introduction to Debian was meaningless and profess not to be making any attacks in his post.

Actually, yeah, I open up my case a lot for several things. Reliance on software only tells you what the software knows. If it's wrong and someone doesn't know what's in their box - and we are talking about knowing systems - they're screwed. For instance, idiot newb that I obviously am, I installed an extra stick of RAM and a new hard drive. Thus, there I am in the case. And when I hooked up the drives wrong and got a helpful blank failure from the software, back in I went and redid it. Reliance on software for hardware and reliance on software for things that can be done simply and manually is probably not the best plan. I rely on software to mechanically process dozens of text files to produce an output. Stuff like that. By the all-things-software logic, the Windows registry is great - a single piece of software in a central database. What's easier than that? Now that's a powerful configuration tool.

A case of more admissions of limitations resulting in attack. I explicitly say 'Granted it's my fault' to which you enlighten me by telling me 'If X was configured improperly, that is your fault. If a graphical login was installed and you didn't want it to be, that is your fault. Yes, the install could use some work, but it's not so difficult that it hides what's being installed from you.'

I made the mistake of doing the dselect thing. I couldn't tell if I was satisfying dependencies or ignoring them. Finally I aborted the process, thinking that would leave me with the base system that had already been installed. Instead, I have random pieces of what I 'selected' on there. And I'm not saying this wasn't stupid. I'm saying that I've installed most every flavor of DOS, Windows, and distros like Core - which requires you to compile your kernel in order to boot - and Slackware. So I'm saying that *in my experience*, as someone with no fear of command line tools, much less text-interfaces, and as someone not averse to complicated procedures, Debian's install process, if you try to follow along instead of take shortcuts *was* that difficult *for me*. All they'd have to do is borrow something as coherent as the ncurses kernel config tool instead of dselect and I could have done it no problem. It's like Debian's installer is willfully malicious. And it doesn't address my original point - that dumbly booting into a busted X is... well, dumb. GUI runlevels and graphical logins should not be set until the X configuration is successful.

I'm trying not to resort to personal attacks in kind, but a lot of stuff's 'funny' with you ain't it? I ran jigdo and it didn't freaking work. If it did for you, great! But remember, you're the super-guru and I'm the clueless noob and guess who makes up most of the people trying to get into Linux? They aren't born gurus, y'know? And, once again, it's just another example of Debian making up special tools to stick between the user and the system and, what with dselect and all that, we see how they excel at their special tools.

I have never trolled in my life. And, while in many cases I find your estimation of me unfortunate, I flatly resent that particular accusation. You obviously don't know how I use computers when I'm on a jag - yeah it *was* pretty much 24 hours of use in those 24+ hours. And was that a serious question? Does the fact that it *was* maybe 24 hours make me any less susceptible to your contempt? Does that give me expert credentials? And look at the keyword there - And I claim to want to know how my system works - I didn't claim I did. And Debian is no more 'my system' than the W2K partition I've got stuck on the same drive. My system is a Slack system. And, no, I don't know much about that, either. But I know more, and I'm learning more, and feel I can learn it better and more generally usefully. I am curious - did you master apt in all its variations in 24 hours? To tell you the truth, I'm kind of amazed at myself for getting Debian installed at all. I'm really amazed that, once I started, I did manage to configure X to where it would load by looking in a commented configuration script where found (a) the reference to the special Deb tool and (b) was able to make a manual edit to that file to finish the job that dpkg-reconfigure didn't. And then I'm really amazed I managed to install several apps with this apt-get that I don't understand. And to install the mozilla I wanted despite not being able to with apt by doing it without apt-get. And many more things. That's what I did in my 24 hours. Sorry I didn't master apt-get in its entirety while I was goofing off like that.

It's on your box, man. I'd have thought you knew, but it was especially /usr/share/doc/debian-guide/html/frames/index.html which, admittedly, also had a link to a Stallman article I followed.

Quote:

quote:But I am saying that the *essential characteristics* of Debian strike me as 'atrocious install, Not going to argue with you there, but like I've said before, an install should be the LAST deciding factor for choosing a distribution - you only do it ONCE.

Erm, no. Ideally, you do, but this is my second shot, I think. And while many people may install a given OS once, many - possibly even the majority - have to, or choose to, reinstall at least once.

Again, thank you for correcting my grammar. Despite my lax posting style, grammar and spelling is one area where I am not an incompetent newbie. What is the -vv switch for, anyway? Would that not be a little more verbose than verbose? Verbose is an adjective, and not superlative, so 'excessively verbose' is not redundant. Saying it uses 'far [excessively] too many words [verbose]' is not redundant, but a form of emphasis. For that I point you to http://www.debian.org/ in its entirety. And it is worse than terse when verbose leads you into trying to do stupid things like download by jigdo and use dselect and generally confuses to the point of failure. Terse might also be considered 'succinct' - no more and no less than you need. Much like Slack.

Lalala? And you criticize the lack of substantiveness in my arguments? How am I supposed to provide 'evidence' of something manifestly subjective and non-quantifiable? I didn't say it compiled a kernel slower and refuse to give you my stopwatch recordings. The only evidence I can provide is that I said it. That's how it struck me. I hereby submit first-hand testimony. *shrug*

Well, the X server did but, funny, the Debian system managed to survive those oft-mentioned 24 hours without a crash. This is deliberate bending of my comments. I did not say I wanted a machine to stop working spontaneously. But somehow I have managed to run a 2.4.20 kernel and Mozilla 1.4 and all the like software for substantially longer than 24 hours on Slackware without a crash, since I stopped trying to dialup via modem with a forced insmod of winmodem drivers and got DSL. *That's* what I mean - a system that is so ridiculously cautious. Perhaps Debian is a great server distro. It should take its place in the ranks of Trustix and other popular server distros then and stop pretending to be the standard-bearer for the GNU/Linux movement.

So much for the post directed at me. Later...

I agree with this and I don't. *That* is the attitude I'm talking about - you are a good spokesman for Debian because you share some of the characteristics I find in it. I personally want every cool person and every asshole out there to use Slack because I want it to continue to be supported and to be able to stand up to Red Hat as they become synonymous with Linux. I have no 'purity' test for those who are 'worthy' to use Slack. So I agree with the reasons you state that people should pick their OSes but I disagree with the attitude about 'broad-mindedness required', especially as I think MasterC hit it closer to the mark by describing this funny kind of broad-mindedness with 'It comes across as if you are wearing blinders and all you see is 1 almighty distro.'

And now I'm sorry if a dozen more posts have come up while 've been typing this, as happened last time.

Except that your analogy isn't the same as the one I presented. I said
"Do you open up your case to find out what hardware you have in there? No, you either already know or you use some software that's running on it to tell you what's in there." Yes, to mess with the hardware of COURSE you have to open up the case. But you don't open up your case to realize that you've got a Pentium4 or Athlon in there.

Also, if you're installing software on Slackware "simply and manually" both at the same time, then I want to know what crazy software you are installing. Installation of software on Slackware is rarely ever simple when done manually. Slackpacks notwithstanding, of course.

I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't stray from the points I was making. It was merely an analogy, nothing more.

Um, define a successful X configuration. This is NOT something you can know when a machine boots. You could swap out the hardware and then you'd break your X configuration. There's no way for it to know if your X is configured successfully. But, since you configure it when you install it, it assumes that you can make the appropriate changes to keep it configured correctly when you DO change hardware or anything else that would affect the success of an X configuration.


Considering dselect is ancient and not even developed any more (nor will it ship on the next release) I'd say your example is piss poor. If you want to review Debian's tools, how about you review the ones that are still recommended for use in a recent snapshot of unstable instead of looking at the old tools.



You can master APT in its entirety in a matter of minutes. Just read the APT HOWTO.


Not on my box. Besides, if you think every piece of software that Debian has packaged is representative of Debian itself, then you should think again.



And you still only install it once correctly


Sorry, but you're wrong. Verbose is defined to be excessive, so "excessively verbose" is equivalent to "excessively excessively wordy". The -vv switch has nothing to do with it, it's just a convention, it's not a dictionary definition.


Debian's a great anything distribution. If you are willing to accept older software, go with stable. If you require newer stuff, sacrifice a bit of ease and go with unstable.

Nice quick wit you got there. Fine, Debian's the greatest distro in the universe - you've convinced me. I was a fool.

Just don't address me any more as I and my Debian are off to commune with each other for awhile and I'm not going to be posting anymore for a bit.

As soon as I figure out what's wrong with this site's damn email notification which I turned off *twice* and yet still get mail such as this to brighten my day.