new user, and some questions/comments

[John P. Looney]

 I'm on the rpm-list, and I've noticed lots of PLD contributors on it.
That, and the fact that most of the cool RPMs on rpmfind.net are PLD ones
:)

 So, today when my 2.4.17-pre something box died (filesystem corruption),
I decided to try out PLD. I'm only using it a few hours, so at the moment,
I'm really just seeing things I miss from my customised RedHat 7.2 box.

 First, the installer:
    I didn't want to install it on my old RedHat partitions, just
    in case there was something there I could salvage. When I asked
    to partition the disk manually, it quit, and started downloading
    mod_ide & parted. I thought it was trying to start installing,
    before I'd told it where, and got very upset, until I realised what
    was going on.

    The installer is a little too verbose - it prints each package as it
    downloads & installs them. I'd no idea how long it would take, or what
    it had installed, unless I was looking through everything.

    I was also confused when the installer asked me what to do about 
    multilingual packages - I didn't know would it install packages with
    just polish docs, if I chose english-only etc. That should be cleared
    up.

    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 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 ?

    There was also NIS configuration, or keymap configuration on startup.
    Most likely because the developers don't use NIS, or different
    keymaps. 

 Some other bits:
    The boot was quite slow. I think there must be "sleep 1" buried
    somewhere inside all of the cute '[BUSY]' bits on startup. I was very
    used to /etc/init.d/<scripts> as I was used to Solaris and RedHat -
    Does the LSB specify that /etc/rc.d/init.d should be used ? The lack
    of a "service" command is annoying - I thought that was part of the
    LSB too. I note that PLD uses lilo - why not grub ? It's so much
    nicer.

    I really like the modular approach to some complex RPMs, like apache.
    Load of bits to choose from (I run a very lean apache). That said,
    when the machine booted, it did moan that mod_auth_apache was
    configured, but it had a "dbm_fetch" symbol undefined.

    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:

Apr  3 09:16:28 bartender smtp[8812]: S392188AbSDCIxm: to=<ilug at linux.ie>,
delay=00:22:46, xdelay=00:00:20, mailer=smtp, relay=mail.tuatha.org
([194.125.145.45|25|172.24.1.104|1052]), stat=error2 ^M->> 250 Reset state
cvt=NONE
Apr  3 09:16:42 bartender router[2736]: S392188AbSDCJQb:
from=<mailer-daemon<@>>, rrelay=STDIN ("??"@bartender), size=6641,
nrcpts=1, msgid=<20020403091642Z392188-2736+23 at bartender>

    in my maillog, without mutt reporting problems. This is really bad.
I've never used zmailer, so I tryed to work out where to configure it,
couldn't, ripped it out & put back sendmail (which at least is a one-line
"DS mail.antefacto.com" configuration).

  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.

John

-- 
_______________________________________
John Looney             Chief Scientist
a n t e f a c t o     t: +353 1 8586004
www.antefacto.com     f: +353 1 8586014