6.4.3 not as good as 5.3.1

[fergus]

Oh dear, after the disappointments of 6.2.*, this latest version was so long anticipated. But at just 80% of the size of 5.3.1 things were not looking promising. Lots of shortcomings, but mainly, the lack of libreadline kills this version for me. I haven't even tried the other two main required advances: good pickup of wireless card, and smooth transition from laptop screen to external monitor even when in console mode i.e. init 2. And that ghastly startup/ shutdown voice now makes herself evident even when shutting down from init 2, which is new and very annoying when what one wants is to be sparse and discreet.
Oh boo hoo. So 5.3.1 still rules (but definitely shows its age in some contexts).
I know one shouldn't be critical of free software and, above all, personal effort offered gratis. Thanks so much Klaus for this and all past provision. But who complained that 5.3.1 was too big?
By the way I can't make sense of new output provided by latest version of "fdisk -l" which now identifies weird problems with starting points of some not all partitions: i.e. all those starting with 63 sectors describing geography. Surely this is a local partition-specific architectural requirement, not a fault, and therefore should not be identified as such?
Fergus

[carolus]

And still no gfortran. If the intent is to use apt-get, that assumes an internet connection, enough memory, and a bit of time. It was so nice in 5.3.1 to have everything one needs, installed and configured on a single .iso, ready for use anywhere.

It is convenient to have a file small enough to store in a FAT filesystem (4 Gb), but that is not worth sacrificing important tools.

[chah]

You can change the startup and shutdown sounds by replacing the files

/usr/share/sounds/startup.ogg
and
/usr/share/sounds/shutdown.ogg

with your own chosen files, and have it stored to a persistent medium.