New Debian Installer

[Brian Kelsay]

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

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 don't have to deal with getting all the
dependencies right.  Also you don't have to wade through the list of
packages in alphabetical order, dselect has some nifty vi bindings (don't
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!
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Keep in mind I was doing this after midnight.  The help files were making my head woozy and I 
couldn't easily find the controls to use.  I figured a couple of them out though.  I accidentally 
hit a key and skipped over the beginning instructions in the middle of reading them.  Right after 
that I spilled a coke on my laptop.  That woke me up.   After drying it off and getting Debian to 
continue installing packages I went to bed in disgust.

Deselect could be vastly improved with a different color scheme.  I don't know how color-blind 
people handle it and better controls that stand out at the bottom of the screen.

Brian Kelsay