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Heres a Debian Installer beta4 install report - 50mb cdrom net install that I started to write up last week when I was reinstalling. Since then I've tweaked up a few things, got gnome 2.6 working properly and ditched evolution 1.5 in favour of thunderbird (for the time being anyway - it wasn't syncing the calendar with my pilot and junkmail filtering sucked.)
The installer is good, better than before, but still has problems. Overall though it is probably easier than installing a stable release system and doing the rather large upgrade to unstable. The biggest problem is the 2.4->2.6 kernel, and a few major library changes between stable and unstable.
Anyway... here goes.....
Processor: VIA Nehmeiah C3 Memory: 512Mb (2x256 PC133 DIMMs) Hard Drive: 10Gb Video: Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 128Mb PCI
This machine runs as my main desktop, lately running unstable with experimental gnome packges, using x2vnc with a XP laptop. I tested a previous version of the debian installer on the laptop, but the laptop doesn't support linux enough to be used as a portable. This time I'm documenting the install.
Although this started out as a Debian Installer report, as I got bored waiting through the tedious periods I decided to expand things a little. This document aims to describe how to get a bleeding edge (unstable) debian system up and running for those linux users not so used to Debian. Debian throughly tests all its packages, so by the time things make it into "stable" they might be a year old, I want my new packages, and if things break I'll keep both peices without complaining.
When you boot up the CD, if you just hit enter you'll start to install a linux 2.4 based system, by typing linux26 you'll get a linux 2.6 system. Hit F1, F3 for a list. 2.4, 2.6 normal or expert mode. I choose to install with the normal "linux26" method, as I'm going to be running 2.6 series kernel. Probably not the one installed, but this way I'll smooth the upgrade.
By default en_US is selected, damn USA. Oh well, I can choose en_AU, but not en_NZ... more choices than previous but not enough for me. Okay I can deal.
Choose "New Zealand", "British English"... so far so good.
I watch my machine try to automatically find a DHCP server... and fail? huh? Mindlessly and due to experience with previous debian installers I flick through the consoles, only to find that when I come back to tty1 the video card is looking all funky, and I can see text from two different consoles at once. Not good. PCI GeForceFX 5200 video card, not uncommon. (Turns out that this is mentioned on the errata page, and is only a problem during the install with 2.6 kernels)
Reboot. Start again.
I check to see if my windows machine can still use DHCP, it can. Something weird must have happened with the installer... en, New Zealand, British English... wait... now I'm asked for a host name. Excellent progress.
Debian archive mirror... I enter mine manually. If you're using Telecom Jetstream, logon to jetstreamgames and use ftp2.jetstreamgames.co.nz as your mirror. Ahhhh I love it.
Unstable selected. Erase disk. All files in one partition. I'd have preferred to have the option of reiserfs, but accept the defaults and move on.
Installer appears to have frozen during "retreving debootstrab.installid_dists_sid_main_binary...." I flick consoles - oh shit.
reboot. again. At least I'm getting to know the installer :P
Hey, I notice its loading linux floppy drivers, I dont have a floppy. Oh well cant hurt.
Ah phew, more progress than last time, maybe I'm more patient now. I think the graphics issue is because this appears to be a graphics/svga text mode, not pure VGA. If I have to reboot again I'll try passing vga= to the kernel maybe.
Done. Install grub. Remove CD. Reboot.
GMT, Timezone - the default selection is correct! Excellent.
Usually I'd skip the new user creation here, and create it manually with my usual UID, I'll create a user this time with a different name to see how it goes.
Edit sources list by hand.
deb ftp://ftp2.jetstreamgames.co.nz/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb ftp://ftp2.jetstreamgames.co.nz/debian ../project/experimental main
Watch it time out connecting to security.debian.org.. (Limited internet access at the moment remember) twice... three times. And its trying to grab stable, I'm using unstable. Shouldn't all security updates make it to unstable anyway?
At the fourth timeout (and after making a coffee) I give up an Ctrl-C the download. I get a nice error message saying that the security updates are unavailable and I should investigate this later. I will.
Software selection method, tasksel, aptitude, dselect or nothing. I choose nothing. (We'll deal with this below, most people should just use tasksel)
Yes I will participate in the popularity contest, considerate however that the default is No.
Local mail only.
Login prompt.
Login.... dammmit I want british english spelling, but US keyboard layout. How on earth did this happen. My Shift-3 gives me a pound sign! And my | key doesnt work. how can I grep!!
So the only real problem has been my keyboard. Eventually through grepping, dpkg -S'ing and a lot of > /tmp/foo ; grep /tmp/foo figure out I probably need to reconfigure console-data. After selecting a US International keyboard layout, I'm once again happy. Oops no, I just want standard or my ~ key behaves in a weird way. However this is a major bug that probably should be addressed, I'll report it when I get back onto the net (if its not in the errata already)
Now I'm doing apt manually, but I'd advise most people to use tasksel, it covers all your bases. I'll need X, a better kernel, gnome (plus the fifth-toe extras) evolution (I prefer 1.5 for now) and gallery, which will depend on apache2 and the php modules hopefully. Better not forget ~ openoffice.org. Plus some standard utils I'll need.
apt-get install x-window-system gallery gnome gnome-fifth-toe evolution1.5 kernel-image-2.6-686 openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-gb myspell-en-gb psmisc jed less bzip2 unzip zip ssh
331Mb and about half an hour later I'm accepting the defaults for most questions asked.
First non-default, mozilla-browser dsp wrapper. I choose auto.
I'll also attempt to auto detect video hardware, ImPS2 for my mouse, and Simple to select my monitor. 1600x1200, 21", 16 bit colour. Choose the highest your monitor will go, as long as you're not using xinerama you can dynamically change your resolution under gnome with a nice little utility, and even have it change to that everytime you login. Yay for progress.
More coffee.
So far its been just under two hours since I booted the install CD for the first time. Not too bad considering I'm well on the way to installing most of the software I'll need for my day to day use, and have downloaded it all from the internet as well.
Once the software is installed, and I spend far too much time configuring my video card (need nvidia drivers for 3d accelleration... I wont go into that here) I've taken a grand total of just under 3 hours from inserting the CD, to having all the software I need setup and configured.
Turns out that I forgot about audio, adding snd-via82xx and snd-oss-seq to the /etc/modules fixed the problems with the hotplug scripts trying to load legacy OSS drivers which would then cause conflicts so it couldn't load ALSA.
~From here I went to restoring backups of ssh, pgp keys etc and unfortunately realising I forgot my bookmarks file :( -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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