The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Recent disk set

I got the i386 disk set a day or so ago, got one of my HDs cleared off, 
and did a bare 1.1 install. The following are what I saw to be problems 
during the installation.

While installing the root disk, the ticking clock effect was spoiled by 
the display of '<5>' before each tick through the \-|-/ characters.

The first time through initializing the root partition failed near the 
end, and just hung with the drive light on. The partition was broken and 
unmountable from that point. Rebooting and doing it again ran without 
flaw. As it turned out, I could have skipped this step, as the partition 
in question already had a file system on it. It would be nice if the 
installation software recognized this. I might still want to re-format 
the drive, but the current interface method handles that nicely.

At the point the offer is made to install the kernel, the last base disk 
is still in the drive. No prompt is provided, indicating that the boot 
disk should be inserted in place of the base 3 disk. As I have seen this 
type of problem before, I was able to surmise from the error messages 
that I needed the boot disk in the drive. Retrying after the switch 
worked fine. There really needs to be a prompt here.

On booting up the new system, everything went fine till dselect. When I 
tried to get dselect to mount my CD it failed to mount /dev/scd0 because 
the kernel has no iso9660 support! When I tried to load it as a module, I 
found that it wasn't there! lsmod shows no modules presently loaded. I 
thought the kernel in 1.1 was going to be fully modularized with all the 
possible drivers available? What happened? At this point, if I was stuck 
with only a dos partition and the new installation, I would have to boot 
up dos and copy the CD to HD (with mangled names) and try the HD install, 
or copy netbase, netstd, and ppp packages to diskette, boot linux, and 
install these packages so I could ftp the rest. We really need the CD 
part to work, and the fact that it doesn't isn't the fault of dselect.

I poked around the new system just looking around and found /etc/fstab 
almost completely unreadable. The format is ugly. The column headers and 
the column entries do not line up at all!

At this point I was feeling a little claustraphobic(sp) and booted back 
up in "Old Reliable".

My overall impressions are quite positive dispite the irregularities I 
experienced. The user interface is wonderful! This is the closest thing I 
have yet seen to a menuing system that inteligently presents the operator 
with the most likely next step, with the two next-most-likely actions 
only one step away, while leaving all available options easily 
accessible. I have argued for this kind of approach within word 
processors (I am always doing a job that requires three menu hits in 
three widely different areas of the menu, over and over...) and other 
application programs as a 'process wizard' feature. 
Although I didn't get to do much with dselect, what I saw was 
encouraging. As more work is done on the UI I look forward to seeing 
dselect become a powerful package management tool.

I think that it is late enough in the game that we need to see some kind 
of check list of outstanding issues that need addressing before the beta 
release. That way we can focus on THE important issues and not waste time 
on unimportant details.

BTW, I have not been able to track down the problem with octave and ELF 
yet, and probably wouldn't get it fixed before beta release. This means 
that the old a.out version (1.1.1-1) should probably go back in place of 
1.1.1-2 so at least the package works. The upstream maintainer is working 
on a new ELF version and is too busy to tell me how to fix the old. He 
may beat me to the fix, at which point I will release the upgrade.

Parity on Dudes,

Dwarf

------------                                          --------------

aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 877-0257
      Flexible Software              Fax:     NONE 
      Black Creek Critters           e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net

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