Installing from the Woody Disks -- How?

[Janina Sajka]

I did have the Debian installation doc open in Console 2 of the machine
I was writing from ... Of course, it wasn't going to tell me about
Speakup keywords, and I had no idea, until I looked at syslinux.cfg, how
much it might have been tweaked. Obviously, the kernel was patched.

The process is actually not all that different. I imagine it's not all
that different for any distro. The Debian install scripts are very
Speakup friendly and that's very nice. There are parts of the Red Hat
installation which are tricky--such as the very critical disk
partitioning scripts called DiskDruid. I accepted the defaults the
Debian script chose, so I have no knowledge of how easy or hard it might
be to customize partitioning, though.

One great difference is that Debian always offers multiple options of
what to do next. There is a default suggested next action, and several
alternatives. As it happens, it doesn't bother me too much to
systematically go through sub menus, but I imagine newbies might get
lost.

By the way, I had no problems with errors--even though these disks are
old. Obviously, I will be upgrading the kernel at some point in the next
few days, but I suspect most of the apps that were installed are quite
up to date.

This raises a question: How does one get a list of all the apps
currently installed? I know how to do that with rpm, but I don't know
how to do it with apt, and I don't see the answer in the docs. This
becomes annoying after doing an apt-get update where I'm told something
like "2 packages to upgrade," but I have no notion of what ones are
goiong to be upgraded until after saying "yes" to "go ahead and do it"
under "apt-get upgrade." That ain't right.

Cheryl Homiak writes:
> From: Cheryl Homiak <chomiak at chartermi.net>
> 
> You put yourself to a lot of extra work for nothing. Linux should be the default
> kernel; it's been modified with speakup; that's why you use the speakup disks.
> The instructins luke gave were all you had to do.
> But in your defense I will say that I do not see  an
> explanation of this on the woody speakup page.
> Also, per that readme, realize the disks you are using are not current and not
> official--things have been left out or changed, though the readme itself
> doesn't say what has
> been left out or changed. but once you get your debian system up and running you
> can use apt-get and install and upgrade and get things where you like them.
> by the way, if might be a really good idea to read the debian install manual for
> your architecture on the debian site if you haven't done so; the debian install
> is not the same as the redhat install.
> 
> Cheryl
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175