new user, and some questions/comments

[John P. Looney]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 12:51:36PM +0200, Marcin Chojnowski mentioned:
> OK maybe installer lacks of some information what it's going 
> to do but It's doing something It has to.

 Indeed. And I thought it was very good that it didn't download IDE or
parted, before it needed them. It was just that I got a fright!

> You are trying to compare our small installer to something 
> that RedHat make. The PLD idea is that this system is used by 
> people that used to use Linux everyday.

 Well, no. I understand you don't care about newbies yet. But even I'd
like to see a message like;

 [100 out of 923 packages installed]

 after each install.

> >     I liked the detection of USB devices...but I've a USB mouse, and it
> >     didn't see fit to create a /dev/usb/mice file. I had to do that myself
> >     later.
> I think it could be fixed.

 To point out - I think it's a kernel problem; RedHat 7.2 doesn't work
with this either.

> >     I was quite surprised that there was no X configuration at all. So,
> >     the network installer also had to download all the X modules for all
> >     cards. Will there be one soon ?
> I don't think so, It would take a lot of time to prepare such 
> one. If you have some spare time and maybe you'd like to work 
> with some kind of solution you're welcome.

 I'll have a look at it. The installer should be quite simple...isn't
there a configuration tool shipped with XF 4.x ?

> >     Also, it installs, but does not configure zmailer on install. So, I
> >     sent a few mails in mutt, and it took ages to realise that I was
> >     getting errors like:
> OK, as I wrote before it's not RedHat nor Mandrake. PLD is 
> used mainly by sysadmins that know how to configure their 
> systems. If you look for PLD that will configure all services 
> automagically I think you will never find PLD as this kind of 
> distribution.

 I'm a sysadmin that knows how to configure my system. Or so I thought.
Then I lost ten mails that I thought were sent; this violates the
"principle of least surprise". It's more that zmailer doesn't work
out-of-the-box like qmail/sendmail.

> >   I'm looking forward to using PLD over the next while. One BIG problem
> > I'm had was the lack of a 2.4 kernel. Is there one anywhere ?  I have some
> > old stuff on ext3 filesystems - I've just downloaded a stock kernel from
> > somewhere, but I'd prefer if there was a SRPM I could customise instead.
> 
> If you want to use some experimental packages you should look 
> at ftp://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/nest/
> It will provide you 2.4 kernel and many more.

 Excellent. Thanks! I love that 'poldek --sn nest' lets me select from
there.

 BTW, I'm not complaining. I really, really like PLD so far. These are
just a few little things that I think could be made a little better.

John

-- 
_______________________________________
John Looney             Chief Scientist
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