Installation trials and tribulations

[Ed Bradford]

Today (actually Friday and today) I installed the latest CYGWIN on Whistler
build 2428. Many mirror sites failed to have the correct ncurses.x.y.z
file. Invariably it was "short" and had only 800K or so bytes where it
should have been 5M or so. It failed at ftp.software, nasa, (the first
three choices in the mirror sites list displayed by the setup.exe program).
I finally went overseas to acquire the correct ncurses.

Suggestion -- check ncurses install on the first two mirror sites displayed
by the setup. If ncurses* is correct, then for some reason Whistler is
causing the setup.exe to fail. If ncurses* is incorrect on any of those
sites, you probably want to know about it. If it is Whistler that is
broken, I wouldn't worry about that because if setup.exe fails, then it is
likely that other stuff will fail also. However, if anyone wants more
information, send me email.

CYGWIN seems to work OK under Windows XP.

A big credit to the author of "setup.exe" -- it keeps on trying and finally
succeeds. I know of no other program that so persistently seeks success.
One possible improvment I can think of is that on errors, it could proceed
with the rest of the installation without waiting for my input (pushing the
OK button). Since it will have to start over again anyway, it should get
everything done it can get done. That is what a human would do.

One other possibility is that it could automatically try another mirror
site without waiting
for me to tell it to. Its guesses as to which site is appropriate are
probably better than
mine. Again, that is what a human would do.

Ed Bradford

Your Windows 2000 Arborist and Linux Performance Comparisonist
T/L 589-4410; Outside: 1-919-993-4410
egb@us.ibm.com




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