It feels weird not wearing a ring after so long. I never realized how often I’d subconsciously fiddle with it with my thumb, and I catch myself doing it and finding nothing there. After sticking my hand in a garbage bag, there’s often a slight panic as I sense the ring missing after pulling the hand out, before I remind myself that I didn’t put it on in the first place. Ah, the forces of habit…
Yesterday’s lesson:
Don’t select whole categories of packages in Debian. It’s just a Really Bad Idea.
I wiped Slackware off of my Athlon system so that I could free up some disk space for XP. I rarey ever use Linux on it anymore now that I have two other systems running it, so there’s no sense in letting it hog 100 of the 140 gigs, especially when I have to frequently clean up files to keep from running out of space in the XP partition.
I do still occasionally use Linux on it though, so I left a 40 gig partition and put Debian on it. Slackware’s great on the server, but I wanted to experiment more with other distros with better desktop support. The basic install went smoothly enough, and it was up and running in no time.
Of course, I can’t leave things well enough alone… I pulled up ‘aptitude’ and started browsing the package listings, seeing if there was anything interesting. Since it was getting late and I was impatient and wanted to let the installs run overnight, I decided I’d just select the whole ‘admin’ and ‘base’ categories and sort out the useful bits in the morning.
Oh, that was a mistake… In the morning I discovered that the downloads and installs had aborted partway through due to errors. And that there were now some 50+ package conflicts. And that there were six gazillion settings irrelevant to me that wanted to be configured. And that even after working out the conflicts, there were still installation errors. And after working out those errors, the system plodded along slowly under the weight of some 400-odd processes, when idle. And programs were still generating numerous error reports and mailing them to me. Oops.
So, rather than try to trim things back to what I actually needed, I just reinstalled from scratch again. Now I’ll be a bit more careful about what packages I select…
You got farther than I did. Tried with about three different versions of Debian to install it, and I could never quite get it installed right. Probably for similar reasons.
At least it wasn’t as bad a SUSE. That one doesn’t install. Period. :-)