There is a better program than dselect called aptitude. I have had only one problem with dselect and that was when I was running unstable. I haven't had that problem with aptitude. Aptitude is a nice ncurses menu system that will allow you to set defaults for dependencies. You could set it for picking up all suggested packages. I usually just end up keeping the original defaults. Another neat program for debian is discover. This allows for automatic detection of hardware. I believe it is based off of Mandrake's detection software. Jeff Rasmussen -----Original Message----- From: nick phillips [mailto:np at f-matic.net] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 5:23 PM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: [TCLUG] red hat installer (re:Installfest Distro Recommendation) just a quick note to whoever-it-was asking for a distro recommendation... i had to do a linux install at work for an old celeron box we have lying around, and so i first tried debian, the distro i'm used to working with. i grabbed an old o'reilly debian 2.1 book (i work at a used bookstore, so i could only really use what we had on end), which failed to recognize the ethernet card, and then got stuck in dselect dependency hell, probably because of some problem with the original install cd. after a few minutes of fscking around, i gave up and tried an o'reilly redhat 8.0 disk, and wow - coming from debian, the red hat installer is pretty damn impressive. instantaneous Xwindows installer, ethernet card detected, easy resolution selection -- now i see why red hat has such a following... the only problem i had was figuring out how to get on to the redhat network -- apparently i needed to update up2date and install a new SSL key, and i still couldn't easily figure how to install new packages from RPM with the ease of apt-get, but i'm sure that's my redhat newbieism speaking, not red hat.. anyway, i'm sure this is old news to everyone here, but since i was the one promoting debian before i figured i'd let the world know the errors of my ways.. :) best, nick _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030923/d4fea22a/attachment.html