six not sixteen -- followup to Edd Dumbill

Edd, the typical number of questions asked by the installation of Debian's desktop task is 6, not the "well over sixteen" that you reported. They are:

1. Select X server driver. (Generally has a reasonable default.)
2. Attempt mouse device autodetection?
3. Attempt monitor autodetection? (Basically useless and has the wrong default.)
4. Is your monitor a LCD device? (I don't know why this cannot be autodetected either.)
5. Please choose a method for selecting your monitor characteristics. (Note that the best thing to choose here is "Medium", not the default, "Advanced". If you choose advanced here you'd be prompted for two sync ranges for a total of 7 questions, IIRC.)
6. Please select your monitor's best video mode.

The fact that you saw so many more from fontconfig, cdrecord, kpilot, and so on suggests to me that you were not using debconf in the default high priority mode, perhaps because of a problem during the first stage install. If you'd care to file a proper installation report with logs, I could tell you more.

Belive it or not, we've actually done a lot of work on this, and prodded maintainers a lot to cut down the question count, which used to stand at around 25. Yes, it might be nice if ubuntu could push some X config improvements into Debian, especially since one of X's co-maintainers is employed there. But I have yet to see any fix from the X maintainers or ubuntu for the most egrarious X config bug of all, bug #264792.

Note that I'm posting this as a blog entry in response to yours rather than as a private email, because the last time I emailed you (20040804214234.GA9204@kitenet.net) about negative comments you blogged about the debian installer, requesting more info, you never took the time to reply.