[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi,
I have spent several hours studying various Linux webpage and trying to install the OS, but have not had any successes. There is lots of good information and software, but I do not know where to begin. Can you help me install the Linux OS? If so what information is needed?
you can start with knoppix (google for it), then install it on harddrive... that's probably the easiest way to install a debian based distro...
That's only if you're installing on (newish) i386 hardware, which is a fairly reasonable assumption, as that's what most AOLers have. (Knoppix is at www.knoppix.com, but it's currently "down" in protest of Software Patents.)
A more specific set of installation for Debian in general can be found at: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
It's a big document, but then there's a lot of different paths of installation that need to be discussed: do you have broadband capability? CD burning capability? how do you want your partitions? etc etc etc. In other words, there's no such thing as a KISS installation page for "Debian", per se, although there may be lots of KISS pages for "Debian on i386 if you have enough horsepower and don't mind one big partition instead of a more stable/secure setup and you've already got the CDs in hand and you don't want to upgrade via a win-modem". But then that's not "Debian"; that's "Debian In A Limited Environment".
If you want a simple installation, you probably don't want Debian per se; you want a Debian-based distro, like, as Erik mentioned, Knoppix, or Xandros. If you don't mind learning some of the under-the-hood structure, and want the full experience of Choice and Power and Stability and Freedom, then Debian's your best bet.
Here's a very brief KISS set of installation instructions; they assume you have decent i386-based hardware and a broadband connection, and a fairly standard NIC, and are starting with a blank hard drive, and have another machine from which you can download and burn an .ISO, and are in the US, and are willing to install Testing instead of Stable.
1) From the second machine, go to http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/i386/
2) Get sarge-i386-netinst.iso <http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/i386/sarge-i386-netinst.iso> and MD5SUMS <http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/i386/MD5SUMS>
3) Check the validity of the first file against the MD5 sums in the second file; how you'd do this on Windows is beyond me. (Or you can just burn the .ISO and hope it's valid.)
4) Burn the .ISO file to a CD; make sure your burner settings don't just copy the .ISO as a file onto the CD; it needs to copy the _image_ that the .ISO file represents onto the CD; how you'd do this on Windows is beyond me.
5) Take the freshly burned CD and put it in the machine on which you're installing Debian. Set the CMOS to boot off of CD. Boot off the CD.
6) Pretty much follow the steps as they come; your biggest problem area will be partitions and setting up your network. Get those two things right, and pretty much the rest of it will fall into place for you.
7) You'll be asked to reboot, after which you'll be running a fairly minimal installation of Debian. At this point the installation will resume, and you'll be asked, among other things, to configure where on the internet you want to pull the rest of Debian from; take the defaults.
8) In a little while you'll be asked if you want to run tasksel or dselect (I think -- it's been a while). Say "no".
9) Then you'll be dropped to a command line, and be told something like "Have fun with Debian!".
10 Debian is now installed. You won't have X; you won't have sound/video players; some of your hardware may not be configured; you won't have printing; you won't have a www browser; you won't have email capability. You'll be at a very minimal level. But from here, you can gradually build up the system.
That's about as simple as I know to make it, without knowing what hardware you have, what networking capability you have, how you want to use your system, etc.
-- Kent West ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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