Before I install Fedora Core 3...

[Michael Peters]

On Sunday, December 05, 2004, at 05:15PM, John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:

>On Monday 06 December 2004 05:24, Lloyd Hayes wrote:
>> And Fedora Core works on more computers better then any version of Debian,
>
>Now there's a brave statement.
>
>FC will not install on any of my powermacs (newworld or oldworld), Sparc, 
>UltraSparc or some of my Pentiums (too little RAM).

Actually - Fedora Core does install on PPC.

>
>Debian supports all of those.
>
>How would FC go on my Pentium IIs with 64 Mbytes of RAM? I can isntall Debian 
>on those including a GUI desktop with the expectation of reasonable 
>performance.

I also like Debian - but they spend way too much time packaging and not enough time fixing their installer. Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc. - they exist and are popular in a large part because Debian's installer sucks. When I install it (sarge) - often I have to switch to a virtual console tell it where to mount cdroms. I have to create a /dev/ttyS4 device note if I want to use my PCI card hardware modem, because the installer only makes nodes for ttyS0 thru ttyS3 and doesn't even ask if I might want another. Installer is too braindead to use PPPoE but instead fails at setting up network repositories unless I give it a way to connect via dialup modem.

And there was that time not too long ago where install failed midway thru because some package got installed that from that point on insisted all debs be signed, but none of them were ...

I like Debian, I really like jigdo and the fact that I can with very little downloading refresh my sarge iso's (via jigdo) - but they seriously need to just say no to any new packages until they have a good working installer. It seems people are more interested in making new packages than they are in fixing what is broken, and that's a serious problem for Debian - especially when most of the packages will be used on far less than half the installs. The installer is used on every install.