Mock Ko wrote: > > I'm pretty much now at the give-up point in trying to > install debian.
No need to, IMHO. > This is indeed a very hard thing for me to do, since I > used to install 68k bsd systems manually (building > scripts to mknod all the devices and such). I used to install Linux using Slackware distribution; IMO Debian is a lot easier. > I have now downloaded the ENTIRE debian tree, hoping > that would help, but all I've done is waste download > time. Indeed. ... > This is now my 6th attempt at installing debian. I > have so far not made it past the dselect phase even > once. I think using dselect could be a confusing phase for Debian beginners. It is pretty useful because it has descriptions that give you some picture about what you want to install. But I think, apt-get is much more easier, especially if you already know the packages you'd like to have. I installed Debian on a SparcClassic several days ago; I was about lost in space, but fortunately this mailing-list talks a lot about apt-get, so I tried it. Besides, all I want to have is several Internet daemons like sendmail, apache, fetchmail, etc.; so I think that directly using apt-get would be easier than dselect. It's easier, indeed, all I have to do is to lookup www.debian.org looking for available packages and then type: "apt-get install sendmail" (for installing the mail server). The cute thing about apt-get is that, if the connection get disconnected (I did that via a modem), the next retry will start right where you left it; a nice way of minimizing download time due to errors in comm. link. My only concern is that Debian base-install doesn't include telnetd; I'm not sure why. It seems that Debian wants to make sure that the installers know what they are doing with telnetd; without including it in the distribution, there's a little chance that telnetd would be sitting there unconfigured. But I had expected that telnetd would have been there (in the base-install), and when I figured it out that it wasn't, I jumped into conclusion that Debian was a Windows NT look-alike. > All I want to do is install a base system with tcp-ip > and ipx networking, dhcpcd, X, and a basic window > manager, so that I can go and get the latest kde, run > some kind of GUI package manager, and then install any > other things as I need them. Just take a look at www.debian.org and see all available packages, mark what you need (type them down if you need to). Then, login to root on your Debian machine and type: apt-get install <your_package> You don't need to type in the version numbers, just the name of the package (no .deb either). > Is there any way I can do this with Debian, or should > I be seeking a different distribution? Well, feel free to do so, but I think apt-get is pretty cool. It's worth to mention also that it takes 11 floppies to get a bootable (from harddisk) system (it may take 30+ floppies for other systems). Oki