New Debian Installer

[Aravind Gottipati]

sometime around Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 12:41:12PM -0600
Brian Kelsay wrote:
> By the way, dselect is one ugly beast.   They need to group packages
> better and allow the user to collapse whole trees of stuff.  Nothing
> like looking at 12000 apps in an alphabetical list.  Taskselect is not
> bad, but not neat fine grain enough.  And they need to have a section
> where you pick the window managers/ Desktop Environment that you load.
> I didn't get a chance to turn off KDE or Gnome, I got both and the
> lightweight WMs were twm and mwm and I couldn't remove those either.
> I'll stick w/ Xfce4 thank you.  And Morphix is a way easier install.

The way you tame dselect at least on an initial install is to go and
select the final packages you want, for example select
gnome-desktop-environment and let dselect worry about the dependencies
and stuff.  Don't go through and pick every single package you think
gnome depends on.  This way you still get to say yes/no to the packages
dselect picks for you and you dont have to deal with getting all the
dependencies right.  Also you dont have to wade through the list of
packages in alphabetical order, dselect has some nifty vi bindings (dont
know about emacs), and will let you search for a package with the
standard /.  It is a little daunting at first, but read through the help
screens and you will soon grow to love it!

HTH

Aravind