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and also this installer doesnt have helpfull screens there that woody had.

hda21 does disappear after reboot, as noted furtheron,
though it is only nonexistent devicenode, and not partitiontable getting truncated.

INSTALLING BASE SYSTEM

this seems to hang, but continues after a couple of minutes
(i see on VT4 that kernels are discovered)
'install lilo' offers me bootblock on MBR or on /dev/hda1
while hda1 is for mounting /boot, and root is on hda11,
so i choose advanced.
default target for lilo is /dev/ide/hosts/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
but that is my ide-scsi cdrw,
and installing a bootblock on it might be a problem,
so i change it to /dev/hda11
this gets me an
"ERROR: /dev/hda11 does not represent a partition or harddisk device"
so i let it put bootblock in MBR.

when it is time to reboot, cdrom is auto-ejected; this is good !
(i remember re-entering installer a couple of times
when i installed potato)

kernel detects NICs correctly, and loads correct drivers for them,
but i cant connect to mirrors,
so i escape to another VT and do ifconfig,
which shows me that i have no configured interfaces,
not even lo !
so after some false tries (because what used to be eth0 is now eth1)
if do 'ifconfig eth1 mtu 1496' and 'dhclient eth1'
and then i still have no lo, but ftp works.

i select 'manual package selection', expecting to find dselect,
but get aptitude ;
i need to press random keys to find aptitude help
aptitude starts with a blank screen
(i hadnt selected 'desktop' then, because i was going to do it manually) aptitude's display of dependency info is a pleasant feature!
i can only select from a very limited subset of packages.
i unselect gnome and kde; while i do use k apps,
in woody i found kdm to be too hard to get rid of,
i prefer using olvwm as windowmanager,
and dont want to download whole gnome or kde over my 30 kB/s link.

downloading 111 MB takes an hour or so.

'fontconfig' (never heard of that) wants to know whether to
also make available bitmapped fonts for "applications that use fontconfig"
how should i know answer to that ?
still i select non-default 'yes'; i can always delete it later.
likewise, i never heard of 'freetype autohinter',
and if even fontconfig doesnt know whether this makes fonts look
uglier or more beautifull, why bother me ?

x now offers me option of allowing all console users to log in to x ;
hooray ! (i hope), as i this was often troublesome to me.
i am told about xserver's nice value,
and that it should be 0 for new O(1) scheduler in 2.6 kernel,
and i did select 2.6 kernel, so why ask me ?
'autodetect videocard' defaults to 'no',
but as i am optimistic i select 'yes',
driver 'ati' seems ok.
xserver::pci asks a question that is only for powerpc's and indy's,
and i am on i386 , so why ask me ? (architecture should be easy to detect)
i select autodetection of mouse,
'please select entry that best describes your mouse'
only thing i recognize in these names is 'ps2', but they all have that,
so i go with default.
i make educated guesses about hsync and vsync,
data on what i could use in woody are on hda10,
and i dont want to interfere with setting up base system now,
so i dont mount anything;
also, my mach64 was previously no quite correctly detected,
in that i couldnt set higher dotclock than 175M,
while card's identifying strings say it can do 200,
perhaps that is fixed now;
also, i need to set exact video timings, as my monitor detects
current video modes, and uses stored settings for each one,
and i have tweaked these (back when XF86Config4 didnt exist yet);
also, videomodes are not limited by my monitor,
but by visual flicker, dotclock, and 2MB of onboard RAM.

"ttf-bitstream-vera\n Fontconfig error. cannot load default config file"

END OF BASE-CONFIG

mkdir /mnt/part21
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda21 /mnt/part21

"mount: special device /dev/hda21 does not exist"

ls /dev | grep hda

only first 20 partitions and raw device

startx

fails, but has nice, informative graphical messagewindow

it says that i dont have a windowmanager (as i expected)
and that i dont have a terminal-emulator either
mouse works ok, i can click messagewindow's 'ok' button
screen needs some tweaking ofcourse,
but generally x seems to work smoothly out of the box :-)
back at console, xauth complains
'bad display name "Si:0" in "remove" command'.

so grab olvwm from net...
ifconfig shows still eth1 up and no lo
running dselect...
selecting olvwm, xterm, xemacs
downloading 102 packages, 83 MB (40MB for xemacs), in nearly an hour,
startx works, i can run bash in a terminal window,
but still have no xemacs; it seems to be unavailable !?!
install elvis, purge lpr,nfs,ispell,mutt,wamerican,iamerican,ibritish
(why install spelling corrector by default ?
i am wiseguy myself, i dont need machine for that !)

perhaps 'run sshd' better default to 'no' for innocent users ?

elvis works easy enough (i use it now), but i cant delete newlines.

Si:/# kbdrate -r 30
Typematic Rate set to 30.0 cps (delay = 250 ms)
Si:/# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda
bash: hdparm: command not found
(not installed yet) why is this not standard ?

Si:/# setcolor fg light red , bg white
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_CTYPE = "en_US.UTF-8",
LANG = (unset)
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

These perl warnings are repeated many times,
for every package being configured, for example;
i'lld like to get rid of them !
but i dont know how to set a locale :-(
(ok i can find out if needs be, but i think it is a bug.)
I did not see any configuration menus or questions about locale,
neither during install nor during base-config.

BASIC INSTALLATION FINISHED

now to biggest part of work :
configuring exim4 (hope that didnt change too much),
configuring x
configuring lilo, so it'll recognize my other debian partitions
setting up usernames and numbers
running dselect and looking through each and every package !
(is there a way to feed it list of package that i in woody decided
should/shouldnot be installed, and then copying their status,
and grouping rest together as 'new' packages ?
unfortunately, i think it doesnt exist.)

so far installation took me ca 8 hours minus time to write this

now when i try to install (nonfree) calctool,
i see its name being hyjacked by gcalctool,
and tons of dependencys being pulled in, even scrollkeeper !
and that to get an ugly grey simple calculator !
instead of nice-coloured small calctool.

and no multitasking with dselect,
cannot select next bunch to download while current download runs !
(this probably also was like this, but i just got permanent internet
connection working since last weekend.)

installing debsig-verify immediately changes behaviour of dselect,
making it fail for all packages to be installed next.
as failure occurred after it was successfully installed,
i first suspected debsigs (and then debsums, until it dawned on me)

installed a dozen editors, found emacs21(x11), using that now,
now atleast i can delete newlines,
so i can edit configuration files of exim (and find and read exim4 docs)

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)