another success story

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Well, almost.

I dd'ed the two floppies, booted, and eventually got a pair of floppies
which didn't have bad sectors. The first install I did, when I started X it
failed to load KDE. Just a black screen with a mouse pointer that changed
shape when I clicked it. I poked at it for a while, then decided to
reinstall with more packages (just in case) -- all packages but the
funny-language howto translations.

I picked 'custom' resolution for X, and chose only 16 bit and 24 bit choices
(in terms of color depth). When I started X (via startx), it complained
that there were no 8 bit color choices, and it died. I went into the
XF86Config file and added

DefaultColorDepth 16

to the 'screen' section, and then X booted nicely. My first impression of
KDE is that it's the scourge of the earth, but that's because I'm one of
those gung-ho Linux people, so I'll shut up about that. :) It would be keen
if there were a menu somewhere so I could pick my window manager, but I can
do it manually I suppose. (Likely not everybody can do this, though.)

One slight bug: during the install, after I'd picked packages, it told me
about a pair of packages that required some packages I hadn't selected.
(I think WavPlugin or xwave was one of them, don't remember. Probably
everyone who's attempted to install Indy encountered this.) Anyway, I don't
know what they required that I didn't choose. My instinct says they've got
some false dependencies that were confusing the installer. But it worked ok
anyway.

Another slight bug: this might not be indy's fault, but when I type
"reboot", it does the right thing for a little while, gets to killing gpm,
and freezes. This means I can't get a clean reboot.

But other than that, it looks good. I liked the install. And I really
liked the fact that it had heard of my monitor, so I didn't have to tell
it the refresh/sync/etc rates. (I haven't done a redhat install since 4.2
first came out. Guess I'm behind the times..:)

--Roger