Install report (Fujitsu Lifebook S6210)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 12:39:44AM +0000, Mary Gardiner wrote:

> I'll lead with failures:
> 
>  1. This laptop has a memory stick slot, but nothing shows up in
>  /var/log/messages or in Nautilus when I insert a known good memory stick.

It probably shows up as a fixed disk, if at all...no icon shows up under the
Computer in Nautilus?  Send /var/log/dmesg.

>  2. The desktop icons and icons in Nautilus are all blank pieces of paper,
>  which I take it means "no icon for this".

Temporary situation; should be resolved soon.

> I see laptop-something and mdsomething are installing and then I get a
> failure message saying that some packages could not be installed and
> telling me to retry or exit with a potentially unstable system. There's
> no way to find out which packages it means. The box tells me I could "go
> back" to the select and install packages step.

Unfortunately, that daily CD was not a very good one.

> Other people have noted that asking people to "go back" to a step they
> never went through is odd. The striking thing in my case is the name of
> the step I was asked to go back to. It is the *system*, not I, which
> selects and installs packages. I am taken back to the install menu,
> which is sitting on the "select and install" step. If I select this, I'm
> *still* not asked to select any packages, it just immediately retries
> installing (and fails). So it's a bit odd using the word "select" in
> this context, since there doesn't seem to be any way to do an actual
> selection. The selection is hidden and is only exposed by this one word.

Yes, it should probably simply read "install", rather than "select and
install".  These things are tricky to change due to all of the work that has
been done to translate them, however.  You should never see that text, as
you noted. :-)

> I configured postfix first, a few dialog boxes there that might confuse
> people I guess ("smarthost"?).

You shouldn't have been asked these questions.  Colin, did this daily have
tha latest debconf priority wrangling?

> Eventually the installs finish, I think without asking me anything at
> all. I don't know what the installer would do now, so I just reboot, it
> seems like the easiest way to get everything to start up since gdm
> didn't start after it was installed.

The installer starts up gdm for you after everything is finished.

> YAY gdm starts at seemingly sane resolution. I've been using GNOME 2.6 for
> a while and there's only two comments so far: while epiphany is gone from
> the menu, it seems like it is still the GNOME default browser set in
> "Preferred Applications"; and sudo asks me for my password every single
> time I use it on the command line. I can kind of appreciate why this might
> be good (far more consistent than being asked 'randomly' -- ie after 15
> minutes) but I'm not used to it. There's always "sudo -s" though.

You can change that behaviour by editing /etc/sudoers.  The default was
chosen with a bias toward GUI usage, sacrificing some convenience on the
command line for sudo veterans.  I'm not entirely convinced either way at
this point.

-- 
 - mdz