Never Quite as Planned

Wednesday, March 15, 2006, at 05:35PM

By Eric Richardson

The replacement drive for my laptop came in today. I installed Windows from my restore cd, used a Knoppix cd to run qtparted and free up some space and then went to install Linux via a Debian net-install cd I had lying handy (current as of a month or two ago).

The Debian install got through the cd part, but then things turned a little ugly when it came to installing packages. locale and base-config (I think... something like that) conflicted, and it wouldn't move forward. I flipped over to a terminal and tried to resolve the conflict manually, but only succeeded in making the setup process start respawning.

Handily, by this stage there's a pretty full-featured base Debian installed. I probably could have hand massaged package installation, but instead I used apt-get to install cdrecord, grabbed a new netinstall via wget and burned myself a new cd. That one's now happily installing.

There was a day when I used to think that sort of thing was fun. I think that day may have passed.