Re: Grub failure, Debian 7.0.0 install
Thanks for both of the replies! Craig Sanders said,
if the article is recommending dselect then it's years out of date.
it was good in its day, but it really wasn't designed to cope with 30,000+ packages - it just takes too long to make your selections.
IMO, the same applies to aptitude but the user-interface is a lot easier, and the dependancy/conflict resolution works better.
I prefer the way it works particularly on how it displays dependencies. I find uisng dselect and dpkg I can get exactly what I want, something I found impossible with aptitude. I do not use synaptic as last time a tried it it used the gnome libraries, and I do not have these on my system. I use the great and as yet unsurpassed fvwm for a window manager.
rather than select them manually, you can create a list of packages to install and use 'dpkg --set-selection' to select them. 'apt-get dist-upgrade' will then install them all.
I have tried this I found it works OK copying an existing Debian version, ie say 6.0.6 to 6.0.6 but failed somehow between major versions 5.0 to 6.0. From memory it did no get all the packages due to name changes, one then had go through the system in fine detail to work out what was missing, as major debian version changes are rare the time taken to manually select packages is not an issue after all it only has to be done once no matter how many systems one has. Another __very__ important aspect is it allows one time to go through all the packages to see what neat new items have been included. in amongst those 30,000 odd packages there are some __real__ gems hidden. The phrase "One can't see the forest for the trees" pops to mind. Using Linux know for over 20 years, Lindsay
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 6:16 AM, <zlinw@mcmedia.com.au> wrote:
Thanks for both of the replies!
I do not use synaptic as last time a tried it it used the gnome libraries, and I do not have these on my system. I use the great and as yet unsurpassed fvwm for a window manager.
I don't see the logic behind not using a tool because it uses the libraries of a window manager you don't use. You can still use fvwm all you like, have the gnome-libs, the kde-libs, the ratpoison-libs, whatever installed. I really thought the days of "eewwww, that uses qt, BANISHED" were over. cheers, / Brett
On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Brett Pemberton wrote:
I don't see the logic behind not using a tool because it uses the libraries of a window manager you don't use. You can still use fvwm all you like, have the gnome-libs, the kde-libs, the ratpoison-libs, whatever installed.
I really thought the days of "eewwww, that uses qt, BANISHED" were over.
cheers,
/ Brett
In the end we live in a free society, we are allowed to like and dislike things for personal reasons. If the "like" does not harm anyone and keeps the particular person happy that is all the matters.......... But I will explain this "dislike", as previously stated I use dselect as my package manager of choice, I have tried both aptitude and synaptic and neither program allowed me to work the way I wish. I like a clean tight system without any extra items I cannot use. I found I could only do this with dselect, both aptitude and synaptic installed other items "depends" , ie "recommends" and "suggests" inspite of what one wanted. I found at the time a tried these one simply could not get around this so matter what one did. There is a second reason, some years ago I was trying to find out how the elf library system worked and one of the sets of libraries a tried was the gnome libraries. Gnome is an abstracted interface in essence to make programming "easier", unfortunately what I found was layers of abstraction. The actual librarie function call going through a complex path to the processor. Gnome calling, gtk, that called gdk, that called Xintrinsics, that called the main X11 librarie which actually exicuted the function, None of the intermediate calls did anything but pass on the calls (I traced 4 separate functions, all did the same thing). This sort of thing is the death of a fast system. I actually discussed this with some of the "gnome" people and they could not have cared less. I made a conscous decision not to use gnome after that, Linux being as it is there is few applications that do not have multiple candidates that one can use. No one _has_ to use a particular program. Using Linux for 20 years, Lindsay
Lindsay Sprinter <zlinw@mcmedia.com.au> writes:
I like a clean tight system without any extra items I cannot use. I found I could only do this with dselect, both aptitude and synaptic installed other items "depends" , ie "recommends" and "suggests" inspite of what one wanted. I found at the time a tried these one simply could not get around this so matter what one did.
As I explained upthread, Recommends are opt-out by default in Debian 6 and 7. If dselect doesn't honor that, that's a bug. If you had BOTHERED to read the manpages, you would have seen aptitude --without-recommends aptitude --with-recommends apt-get --no-install-recommends apt-get --install-recommends ...which modify this behaviour on a per-invocation basis. It also describes how to change the default behaviour: echo >>/etc/apt/apt.conf 'APT::Install-Recommends "0";' Suggests are opt-out by default, and always have been. I don't care if you want to keep using dselect, but you might want to find a new a rationale for doing so.
participants (4)
-
Brett Pemberton -
Lindsay Sprinter -
trentbuck＠gmail.com -
zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au