Here's some further info I got, apparently from Andrew Martin Adrian Cater
[EMAIL PROTECTED], along with some questions/comments by me. Since the
return address didn't work, I'm hoping he will catch it here. (Also, I'm
trying another address).
Just so it doesn't get buried, the highlight is don't do a direct install
of xfree86 using the graphical tools from the CheapBytes CDs.
[I wrote, in response to his reply...]
Thanks for some really useful info. I have a couple of questions, and a
comment.
On handling the multiple CD's, you [Andrew] write
Load the first CD: take what you can from it, then load what CheapBytes calls
extras. A lot of work has gone into fixing this for the next release: in
the interim, take the CD's individually.
The point I ran into trouble was where it asked for the path to the root
(e.g., .../stable).
Whichever CD I put in, it won't find everything, right? Or were you
suggesting entering none for that (as I did) and then swapping CD's when
prompted for the individual component directories?
Or, on the third hand, are you suggesting making 3 independent passes
through the whole dselect routine?
Is the fixing you refer to in Debian, or the CheapBytes distribution? Or
is it that Debian needs a new option to handle archives split across CD's?
I thought copying all 3 CDs to disk would get around the problem, but
apparently the symbolic links make a copy occupy far more than 650Mg. So I
gave up.
The comment: I'm trying to minimize /, so I need other partitions for all
else. The way the installation goes, it seems to require separate
partitions for each mount point (/usr, /home, /var) to avoid having them
dumped onto the root partition. I know I could have just one extra
partition and use symlinks, but I don't know if the installation scripts
would go for it.
One more question: The graphical xfree is broken on Cheapbytes because they
have a bad or dated copy? because it doesn't run from a CD? some other
reason?
At 09:45 PM 1/23/99 +, you wrote:
On Sat, Jan 23, 1999 at 11:41:33AM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
I just tried my first install of Debian. It didn't go very well.
Fortunately, I did it in the spirit of a trial run.
That's OK - perhaps I can get you a bit further
I have a Pentium 100, 64 MG Ram, and a recently added 13.6Gig Maxtor hard
drive + 2 older drives. The install targeted the new drive, which is drive
0. I used the Debian 2.0 CD's from CheapBytes. I had run Maxtor's
MaxBlast program, which sticks EZ-BIOS in the boot sector to overcome
BIOS limitations.
I booted off the CD. I tried to give drive parameters at the boot prompt,
but it wouldn't take any of the syntaxes I tried were accepted.
cfdisk seemed to allow the creation of many logical partitions. I thought
they all needed to be within an extended partition. Is that not the case?
At any rate, I created logical partitions to hold /, /usr, and swap.
IMHO Stick with two partitions unless you really need to split out /home for
lots of users. If you have a separate /, this only needs to be small: other
wise use a main partition and a swap partition.
I elected to install modules for Win95, ppp, a.out, ppp over parallel
ports, and some others.
If you are planning to use a printer - don't install PLIP initially.
I got the message Drive 0: deviation=-4080 during the install.
I think you can ignore this: it's probably fdisk setting up a parameter
to tell it how the drive responds.
Eventually I got a menu of installation types, and picked home (though
really I want home + development).
Redo this step: don't pick home - instead pick custom which will allow
you to pick the individual package bundle selections. Alternatively, skip
this step: install purely the base system and then install individual
packages from dselect - this takes much longer but will allow you to select
individual packages.
I started walking through dselect. It wouldn't take a pointer to my CD for
the whole package, and made me walk through the locations of the individual
parts. I think the problem was that the CD only contained some of the
parts (not contrib or non-free, which are on some of the other CDs in the
set). I there a way to make dselect happy when installation materials are
spread across several CDs?
Load the first CD: take what you can from it, then load what CheapBytes calls
extras. A lot of work has gone into fixing this for the next release: in
the interim, take the CD's individually.
wwwdialup complained it couldn't find a modem (hardware problem, unrelated
to Debian). Then I got to the xfree86 install. A very short way through
it started to do the config file. I ran into trouble, and said n to
installing it. At this point it hung.
Don't run the graphical install (XF86Setup) from that set of CheapBytes
disks.
Run the command line text based xf86config utility. XF86Setup was broken on
these disks.
When I rebooted the system I found it wasn't too functional; man wouldn't
