Hi. I took some personal notes in a message format during my first Debian install. I'm posting them here in case they might help someone else. If I've said anything horribly wrong then sorry. I've only been using Debian for 3 days now. All these notes are my experience and opinion only. If I've violated any sacred Debian laws then feel free to follow-up.
---------- My Debian Install Notes: To start, I downloaded the following file and burned it to a CD: http://people.debian.org/~blade/boot-floppies/netinst-full-pre/bootbf2.4.iso There are tons of boot images, and in blade's directory (see URL above) the same ISO file exists under a few different directories. Finding the right boot image is a bit tricky because there are so many, and each is a bit different, however I think most of them are common enough to handle most install needs. There are "vanilla" flavors, and bf2.4 flavors, and each mean something a little different and you can read more about that on the Debian site. I chose the bf2.4 image because I read something about it supporting USB well, and I have a USB mouse. After I had the CD, i went into the BIOS and switched the boot order to run the CD before the hard drive, and the Debian installer loaded. This let me partition things. It was straightforward until I got into the somewhat intimidating "Configure Device Drivers" section. The first time i skipped it, and that was a mistake. It never loaded my network card driver, and so I couldn't do the network install. Basically, despite a very long and intimidating (to me) list, All i had to do was scroll down and find the network or ethernet section, and find my ethernet driver (which was tulip) and activate that so it was built or added to the kernel or whatever that does. Someone on the #debian irc channel on irc.freenode.net said that I probably didn't need to worry about all the other hundred categories of device drivers, and they were right. Some people might need some extra ones though. I just didn't want to spend all day picking out tons of drivers, which was my initial (incorrect) assuption when i saw that screen. Next, it asked me to configure my network. I added my IP, netmask, DNS, etc, and after a few more options, I booted into a simple, basic no frills debian. The first time after it rebooted, i got to set my root password, and after doing that, it automatically ran two programs called "tasksel" and "dselect". Tasksel is basically a program that lets you grab a bunch of related packages at once, so if you check "X window system" and "Desktop Environment" it will go out and grab all the XFree stuff and KDE or something like that. It's meant to get you started so you don't have to boot into a command prompt and then fend for yourself. After trying to use tasksel once, it worked OK, but eventually I chose to reinstall and skip that step. After tasksel, it runs "dselect", a program which is supposed to allow you to pick all sorts of packages and it calculates dependencies and whatnot. The instructions tell you to use this and NOT use apt-get for big upgrades and installations and such, however I must make it clear: ** dselect was awful, seemed to mess up alot, and confused the hell out of me. When I told it to grab one thing, it would try to grab all the dependencies too, which theorhetically is good, but it was goofy and i felt like i had no control. Eventually, some kind of dependency messup happened and that was it, i was in dselect hell. I'll try to never use it again. Instead, I quit both tasksel and dselect WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING, and went into a bare, debian command prompt with only minimal stuff installed that came with the netinst CD. It was a clean system that couldn't do much at this point. Next, I wanted to get KDE 3.1 running. I decided that basically I wanted to run the latest and greatest of everything despite one of Debian's features being the stability of the present Woody release, so I edited /etc/apt/sources.list to look like this: deb http://mirror.csit.fsu.edu/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free What this did is told debian WHERE to go to get files. See where it says "unstable"? well you can also duplicate the first two lines, and duplicate them twice (so there are 6 total) and change two of them to "testing" and the other two to "stable" if you want more options. You can read about debian's stable/testing/unstable releases on the Debian main site. Next, I had to make an /etc/apt/preferences file that looked like this: Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 600 once again, you can have a testing and stable version of these 3 lines also. And you can read about the PIN priority also, it's a pretty robust system of being able to upgrade, downgrade, etc with various stability levels of the programs. I just want the cutting edge stuff, and realize it may not all work great, so I just put in the unstable line. There are some links that talk about pinning at http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html and http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html Next, sometimes when I would run "apt-get update" it would crash if there were too many package names it grabs to tell you whats available, so I made a file called /etc/apt/apt.conf (don't be confused by the already existing directory apt.conf.d) and in this new file I put the line: APT::Cache-Limit 25165824; and don't forget the semi-colon. Then I ran "apt-get update" and it fetched all the available packages I could install. I started with two bases, I wanted to get X Windows and KDE running, and I did with: apt-get install x-window-system apt-get install kde-base they installed great - but some standard X/KDE problems happened. First, my USB/Optical Logitech Wheel Mouse was acting downright weird. Occaisionally it would experience pointer jumping. I solved this by doing an "apt-get install gpm" and changing the device to /dev/gpmdata in my XF86Config file. Also, sound seemed to be having a problem, and I went into a program (i think it was modconf or something?) and made sure that the following drivers were out there, kernel supported, etc, etc, and i also added the following into /etc/modules : emu10k1, op13, sound, soundcore, ac97_codec -- and after doing that sound worked through the artsd program. You may have to restart artsd or even reboot to get the modules working unless you want to do a "modprobe <modulename>" on them all. Great, KDE, Mouse and Sound working. One final problem, although sound was working, my favorite player xmms wasn't playing anything. I needed to get a program "apt-get install xmmsarts" which is the xmms arts output plugin. After installing that, I went into xmms, preferences, and changed the output driver to artsd (before that it was at the default OSS) Then I grabbed some other programs too, like mozilla, xchat, gaim, etc Someone told me at this point that i might want to do an "apt-get dist-upgrade" and that was a good idea. Basically i still had some old packages from the original netinst CD, because I never bothered to update them. They were still in the "stable" version even though everything else I was using was from "unstable". I had trouble installing "apt-get install kuickshow" for example, until after i had done the dist-upgrade. Those were the problems I had trying to install Debian for the first time. As always, installing a new OS can be a bit tricky, but I really like Debian's feature of being able to start off with a clean, bare-bones OS and then being able to add things package by package. I also found the following commands useful: apt-get remove <package> for when i messed up and wanted a package gone dpkg -i somefile.deb for when i found a .deb that was not part of the debian sources that i had dpkg -l gave me a list of packages on my system, similar to "rpm -qa" on redhat dpkg -L <package> told me what files, and where, apt-get put things from recently installed packages Hope these notes are helpful to someone. Please remember that if you ask a question on the internet/mail lists and you find out how to fix something, it's always nice to post one final message and say how you got it working. I always find posts where people say "i figured it out" but don't tell how extremely annonying. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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