A few weeks ago, I purchased the one-CD Debian starter kit that includes a copy of O'Reilly's Learning Debian. I managed to install the files on the CD, and at the moment I have a working text-based Debian system.
I would, however, like to have an *updated* working text-based system, with Pico, the Unix editor I like best. I would also like to be able to run X and to use Netscape. (The one-CD kit included only the main, stable distribution; no contrib, no non-free, no source, no potato). My video card is an STB Velocity with 16 MB, and I find upon investigation that I need some potato files to get it to run X. I have tried, so far, FIVE times to use DSELECT to update my install. I've used apt and successfully linked to the update site; I've successfully updated the list of updates. I've then started trying to do something useful with the list. DSELECT tells me that my C++ 2.8.2 package is broken, and it then apparently tries to remove everything that uses C++. If I go straight to "install" without doing anything other than getting the list of updates, the program asks me if I really want to uninstall 90% of my system, which, of course, I don't. If I persevere and start putting everything back to "install" or even to "hold", then, invariably, after I've spent about two hours patiently marking files "install" (yes, I'm marking by category, but even that takes that long when you're talking about a thousand files and when you have to try to unravel dependencies), I will get to something which requires a version of C++, and even if I don't mark C++ for removal or anything, I'll find that, once again, it has marked everything that uses C++ for removal, undoing nearly everything I have just done. Installing piecemeal won't help because the darned thing retroactively changes install/remove decisions and I'd still have to clean up after it whenever this happens. Moreover, the one time I let it get to the "Do you really want to uninstall 90% of your system" stage, it was proposing to download 93 megs worth of files. People, I have a 28.8 net connection and an ISP that isn't all that reliable. The largest file I've *ever* d/led on this system was about 30 megs, and I've tried unsuccessfully for 50 meg demos before. It is obvious in retrospect that I ought to have bought the four-CD set, though I'm not sure even that would have helped me, since I need potato to run X. But I hate to spend *another* $20 for more CDs for an OS I'm not even certain I want to use -- I just wanted to try out X, for Pete's sake! Is there any way I can get the packages I need without all of this infernal attempted removal of files I must have? I don't know enough about Linux to do without those dependency alerts, but I do know enough to know that I can't manage without the required files DSELECT keeps trying to remove, which is more than DSELECT seems to know! If I had a way to find out the dependencies independently of DSELECT, maybe I could do something manually, but I don't know how to do that. -- Meredith Dixon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Check out *Raven Days*, for victims and survivors of bullying. And for those who want to help. http://web.mountain.net/~dixonm/raven.html
