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
