On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 10:47:48PM -0800, David Steinberg wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > I've been using Red Hat for a reasonable amount of time, but I'm a total > newbie to Debian; I'm just installing potato for the first time today.
welcome to our corner of the universe... > I'm starting to get familiar with the tools, but I must admit that I'm a > little overwhelmed by the number of packages in the distribution. And > so far, I've only been looking at the one binary CDROM. :) > > Is there a sane approach to initially selecting packages? Is it best to > use the tasks, or go through the entire list package-by-package? Would > you start with just the CD and then add the FTP site to sources.list > later, or consider everything all at once? no. yes, probably. no. :) actually, the real answer is -- it depends... on you. if you're familiar with linux in general, you might have a chance at selecting which packages you'd want by hand, as if painting with a three-camel-hair brush. if you're looking to get started quickly even tho lots of excess flotsam is likely to clutter up your system do the 'tasksel' which is like painting with a roller. a linux newbie wouldn't have a clue whether she's interested in pump, libpgperl, mutt or exim. here's how i did it: 1) install everything. 2) be overwhelmed. drool a lot, but bang your head on a wall, often. 3) reformat, install most everything. 4) get lost again (enjoying every minute of it). 5) subscribe to and scan back issues of debian-user. 6) reformat, install a handful of miniscule gadjets. 7) install that other package i forgot i used all the time. 8) go to step 7 every other day. > Acutally, I have a further question about the task packages. Using > dselect, if I try to purge a package that has been added bacause of a > task, it tells me, of course, that the task package depends on the one I > want to remove. Should I remove the task? Will all the other packages > that were installed because of it remain? usually, from potato (2.2) onward, we lean toward using the apt-get gizmo, which is a direct descendant of dselect. to set it up you'll need apt-setup which is in the base-config package, if you don't have it. apt-get update apt-get install base-config apt-setup if you can't "apt-get update" yet, then finish up with dselect until you have apt-setup; then you can use apt to peel packages from cd, other drives ... or even via http/ftp. mucho coolio. > Sorry for the newbie questions. Thanks for any help. sorry for the newbie answer. hope that helped. :) -- See, if you were allowed to keep the money, you wouldn't create jobs with it. You'd throw it in the bushes or something. But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs. -- Dave Barry volunteer to document your experience for next week's newbies -- http://www.eGroups.com/messages/newbieDoc