Installation on Old System [was re: WARTY review]

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 21:40:29 -0800, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 11:12:19PM -0600, Tommy Trussell wrote:
...
> > 1) The custom installation completed but until I manually ran apt-get
> > upgrade it did not pick up the 10 outstanding updates. I kindof
> > figured it would do the updates automatically during the install,
> > especially since most came from the security repository.
> 
> The installer asks a question about this, whether it is OK to fetch updates
> from the network.  At least, it does so in a standard install.  Was this
> question skipped in your custom install?  If so, it's not much of a bug; a
> custom install deliberately leaves things like this up to you, and does the
> minimum to get the system up and running.

The installer asked if I wanted to get updates from the network, then
it proceeded to configure the apt sources... BUT when I was finished
it had not retrieved the updated packages -- just configured some
sources.

> > 2) The installation was very simple and the installation has a good
> > basic configuration but I kindof expected it would prompt me through
> > adding some other apt sources ... as it is, dselect reports that
> > EVERYTHING available is installed. I will have to think about whether
> > this is the best thing for a "custom" install. It's certainly simple!
> 
> Do you really mean EVERYTHING?  The custom install selects only the base
> packages, and nothing more.  No window system, no graphical applications,
> nothing.  The available package list will contain everything which is on the
> CD, which includes the entire default install (with GNOME, etc.).

I typed "custom" at the boot prompt. What you are saying is correct;
what I meant to say is that when you run dselect it does not SHOW any
other packages to install -- it shows only the few dozen that are part
of a very basic installation. It's as if there's a special repository
for just the base installation and that's all you see.

I have not gone back to investigate further (yet) -- as you can
imagine I've spent a bit too much time on this puzzle over the last
several weeks. HOWEVER I am very satisfied with the outcome so far.
It's very nice to be able to make something work. :-)

I'm going to try a few more installations on the box, but being a 200
Mhz system the whole process takes much longer than on a newer system.
Having DMA enabled makes a noticeable difference but it's still pretty
slow.