new user, and some questions/comments

[Marcin Chojnowski]

Dnia Pańskiego 03 Apr, 2002, John P. Looney napisał(a):
>  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.

OK maybe installer lacks of some information what it's going 
to do but It's doing something It has to.

>     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.

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.

>     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.

>     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.

>     LSB too. I note that PLD uses lilo - why not grub ? It's so much
>     nicer.

It doesn't matter I think that lilo is set by default, but 
you can switch to Grub anytime you want.

>     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'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).

Many people are using Postfix or Exim as sendmailers. But it's 
up to you witch one you will use. The problem maybe is that 
installer is not asking witch MTA you would preffer.

>   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.

Martii