Re: Preparation for Debian Installatin
<quote who="alex">
> All the furor about the difficulty in installing Debian makes me wonder.
>
> What kind of preparation will improve your chances of doing a successful
> Debian installation?
in my experience the #1 'problem' with installing debian is
hardware that is unsupported. unsupported disk controllers,
or video cards or sound cards or network cards.
5.
> Study the documentation (TFM) that describes the installation and the
> options
> before doing the installation.
i would do this, as well as general unix documentation if the
person installing has no unix knowledge.
> 7. Ask on this list for a step by step procedure.
this works too. at my company a while back we had an office
with no IT staff(there was once, but they got laid off), i had
to get a sales guy to install debian, so i went through the
installer and wrote a step-by-step install to get the basic
system up and on the network. it is a 59 step process for
the first part of the installer(before the reboot to boot
the installed system), and 20 step process after the
initial reboot. i did not include any fancy configuration,
just enough to get it on the network and install ssh, then
i continued the configuration from there. this was on
very well supported hardware. the only problem the guy
had was he mistyped the partition sizes, he ended up with like
a 30gig / and a 5gig swap, which was way off, so i had
him reinstlal and he got it right the second time.
> 8, Read the man pages.
> 9. Select the default installation.
> 10. No preparation needed---whatever you select will do the trick.
practice is important too. I never found debian's instller difficult,
possibly because i came from a slackware background which had
a similar installation, manual configuration of everything, at
least thats how i did it at the time(slackware 3.2).
but the #1 thing i believe is use hardware that is supported,
if the hardware is well supported that will eliminate ~80% of
any problems you may encounter I believe. when in doubt, post
to the list with the hardware and ask for advice.
sample hardware configuration for an easy to setup debian system:
Intel P3-800
Asus Motherboard
512MB ram
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Controller
Seagate SCSI disk connected to controller
Toshiba SCSI cdrom connected to controller
Matrox G400 video
Sound blaster PCI 128(ES1371) soundcard
viewsonic monitor
3COM 3C905B-TX Network card
with that kind of setup, debian potato, or debian woody
(by way of initial potato install) would be a near snap
to setup. i must point out that as far as video is
concerned i would NOT consider setting up full 3D
acceleration in X a part of installation. X runs perfectly
fine on my Matrox G400s with no 3D acceleration.
now if you have some fancy motherboard with
framebuffer graphics and $5 soundcard, with onboard $5
network card on some onboard ata raid controller with
the disks in a raid array your likely to have a WHOLE
lot more trouble. it may not be impossible but it will
be much much more difficult.
hardware seems to me the problem with most OSs, even
on MS OSs, a few years back i worked a company where
I did a lot of win95 and win98 installs, the first thing
i'd have to do is install a bunch of drivers since the
OS did not have anything for the sound or video or
network or modem etc.
if you can get hardware that the OS has builtin support
for you'll save yourself a lot of frustration, on
any platform.
and if you want that guide it may help you build
your own guide i can supply it.
nate
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