Re: Debian Install program [ was Re: tlug: CDRom Burner & Debian 2.0 distribution]

[Craig Oda <craigoda@example.com>]

From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>

> URL, please.  ftp://ftp2.linux.or.jp/pub/linux/debian-jp isn't even a
> Debian distribution any more (it doesn't comply with the archive
> structure).  Nor is it properly integrated with the main Debian-2.0
> distribution.

The following is the announcement from www.debian.org

> Debian JP (Japanese) Packages for Debian 2.0 (Hamm-JP)
> released!

> 28 Aug 1998
> The Debian JP Project has officially released Debian JP Packages for Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 'Hamm-JP' for the i386 and
> FM-TOWNS architectures. 

> It can be obtained from: 

>       ftp://ftp.debian.or.jp/pub/linux/debian-jp/ 
>       ftp://debian.softagency.co.jp/pub/debian-jp/ 

> For further site information please visit http://www.debian.or.jp/Link.html. 

> What is Hamm-JP?

> Hamm-JP is a set of add-on packages for Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 'Hamm'. It completely conforms to the Debian Free
> Software Guidelines (DFSG), which guarantee Hamm-JP to be 100% free software. 

> Hamm-JP is comprised of over 210 precompiled binary packages, including: 


> As for "stable," upgrading the JP stuff has left me without a working
> Linuxdoc-SGML and I had to nuke my entire TeX distribution including
> teTeX to get Japanese TeX mostly working---but the fonts suddenly
> turned ugly.

I hope that my loose usage of the word "stable" did not result in your
upgrade and problems.  There are definite  issues with Japanese in all
the distributions that I know of.  I may have been a bit too enthusiastic
and I hope that I didn't cause other people's systems to get messed
up.  The issues with TeX always get to me too.  It actually took me
a few days to get everything working to my satisfaction.  

This is what I'm using
ii  linuxdoc-sgml-j 1.5.1-5        Linux Documentation Project SGML tools (Japa
ii  jtex-base       1.8-2          basic jTeX library files.
ii  jtex-bin        1.8-3          Japanese TeX (NTT version) and other japanes

Both worked straight from a clean install.  I installed Hamm-JP on a clean
machine.  The linuxdoc-sgml-ja is using libc5.  I have both tetex and 
jtex installed on the same machine.  The screen fonts were at first
ugly, but I switched the X server to use TrueType fonts and now they
look fairly smooth.  The appearance of text on the screen improved 
dramatically after the upgrade.  Linuxdoc-sgml works only with EUC
encoding.  This is kind of interesting since I think jtex uses JIS
internally, at least the log files and stuff are in JIS.


As a side note, I spent a week trying to get Red Hat 5.1 working
cleanly with both jrpm and PJE and finally gave up and went to 
Debian JP.  The system I'm temporarily using has a really small disk
space and I didn't have enough space to compile things like XEmacs
from source.  I think PJE is still based on RH 4.2 which is libc5 based
jrpm has both a libc5 and a  libc6 version, but there are some issues
with the libc6 version.   In a relative comparison to PJE and jrpm 
installed over RH 5.1, I would say that Debian Hamm-JP installed over
Debian 2.0 (Hamm) is more stable.  However, I don't think it qualifies
as production quality stable.   This is not to say that RH5.1 and PJE or
jrpm is bad.  I have some special requirements and didn't have the 
space to install all the development libs.  If I had more space,
I probably would have stuck with RH 5.1 since I could have compiled
some stuff from source and would have had more transparent use
of the NFS and file servers where I'm at which are RH based.  

Regards,
Craig  (trying not to appear biased but still thinks Debian rocks.)



Craig Oda        craigoda@example.com
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