Debian, and its shortcomings

[bob at sinister.com (Bob Keyes)]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Bob Keyes <bob at sinister.com> writes:
>
> > Prism2
>
> Prism2 isn't supported by ANY distro by default, AFAIK.  It's not
> in Red Hat, either.


I didn't know it wasn't in any linux. It is in openbsd and freebsd by
default, but is horribly broken. (i.e. with my senao card one of them
doesn't detect it, the other one detects it and crashes, during the
booting of the install disk).

> I dont know why the linux-wlan driver isn't
> incorporated into the kernel, or packaged by distros.. But c'est le vie.


Probably due to no one wanting to make a choice between hostap drivers and
linux-wlan-ng. IMHO, hostap should be part of the kernel, because it uses
the common API for linux wireless tools, and is simpler, and better.

In any case, a debian "task" for wireless would be welcome.

As I am installing debian 3.0 right now, I decided to double-check the
statements I made earlier about its extraneous packages. With the tasks of
conventional unix server and C/C++ , it does indeed install emacs20 and
emacs-common, along with ispell, libfreetype6, libglib, libgtk, libpng,
libxaw, pdksh, lpr, python, wenglish, xfree86, xlibsm abd zsh -- all
packages that are probably quite useful but certainly not appropriate for
the base install of a convential unix server.