On Sun, 10 Aug 2014 10:46:56 -0500 Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net> wrote:
> My goal: understand Debian from a fairly low level on up > Environment: a laptop dedicated exclusively as a learning environment > Resources: complete DVD sets for Squeeze and Wheezy (totally > isolated from internet ;) > > History: > When initially moving from Windows to Debian, installed Squeeze > with Gnome2. A generally satisfactory experience though standard > install had programs I would never use and was missing essential > programs. I was tweaking it when I obtained Wheezy. > > Gnome3 is an ugly non-starter. Investigating relative merits of > DE's led to understanding difference between a DE and a WM (thank > you to list for educational posts). > > What should I be reading to understand: > 1. what would be minimal set of programs to install? It depends how enthusiastic you are. I tend to make a netinstall of stable (from CD, you don't need the Net until you want to expand the system). When the task selection page comes up, I untick everything except the system utilities. That will leave me with a non-X installation which can be built on. It doesn't contain sudo, which you may want, and I also install mc, because I like it. Generally I'm aiming for unstable, so I do a dist-upgrade at this point, where a minimal amount of time has been wasted in downloading stable packages which I'm now throwing away. You presumably would take a different path. It is possible that the minimal non-X netinstall still contains packages which you may not want, I've never tried cutting it down smaller than this as I will ultimately be aiming for an X-based installation, and it doesn't seem worth trying to save a few tens of K here. Pretty much anything that might be removed here will be reinstalled when X is loaded. Life's too short. I would say that if you trust the Debian dependencies, you now ask for your X environment of choice, and it should pull in all the X system stuff without explicitly asking for it. If you only want a window manager, just ask for that. After this, you install the applications you actually want, and try not to scream too much when you see what else they want to bring with them. It's nice to use the program you feel most comfortable with, but you need to think carefully when you want a 300k utility that needs 100MB of libraries from a DE you will never use... it's not just the disc space, which isn't worth worrying about, nowadays you never know what interactions will occur. Linux is becoming as 'integrated' as Windows, and 'integrated' is a dirty word to a programmer, for good reasons. I currently have boot error messages from an 'at-spi2-registryd', which is apparently a daemon associated with 'assistive technologies', which I currently neither want nor need but which the Gnome developers have decreed must run on my system if I want to use Evince or Nautilus, and I do. > 2. what scripts get run after a cold or warm boot? > (I've discovered I know less about that than I thought I did.) How long was that piece of string? You might want to pause here and look at the discussion going on about systemd. The next stable will almost certainly have it, so you might as well learn to live with it now. One of its advantages is that it will give you very detailed logs about what it's doing during boot, though you have to find out how to tickle it properly. There's certainly not much point in learning everything there is to know about sysvinit, only to have it become a relic in a year's time. Your project has been going on for some time, and I can't remember if Linux From Scratch has been mentioned. I built a couple at least ten years ago, while the automated build systems were still vapourware. Apart from the enormous drudgery of compiling a huge number of programs, it did demonstrate exactly what a minimal Linux needed to do. It was necessary to write the init scripts, and I recall later using the template to make an iptables pseudo-daemon, which I still use. You can learn quite a bit just by going through the instructions, without actually making anything. -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140810180307.6383f...@jretrading.com
