Re: Initial install question
On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 03:32 -0500, Mark Anderson wrote:
> Greetings. I just installed Debian using the ISOs from your site.
> Everything went fine and then i got the "login" command. At this point
> I typed in my username and password and what i got was this:
> name@debianhome: ~S: (the "name" being my username i made during
> install). I can't get beyond this to the GUI. I have little knowledge
> of command line use and none of Linux in general, which i imagine is
> obvious by now :) I would appreciate help in how to get beyond the
> point i've descibed above. Thank you.
I would guess that you didn't select any desktop option during the
initial install. That's usual when setting up a webserver or similar,
but of course not so useful for general use!
No problem, you just need to:
* log on as user "root" (the superuser). You will have been prompted to
create a password for this account as part of the install
* type "apt-get x-window-system-core" to install the basic graphics
system
* type
"apt-get install gnome-desktop-environment", or
"apt-get install kdesktop"
depending on which desktop you want. You can even type both to get
a choice.
I think that's all you need; after that rebooting should give you a
graphical logon. I don't know if your graphics will be properly
configured, though: you've skipped the hardware detection that's built
in to the installer and I don't know how to manually run that. If you
selected the Gnome desktop then you might need to go into "applications|
Desktop Preferences|Screen Resolution" to select a reasonable
resolution. If you chose the KDE desktop option then there will no doubt
be a similar option somewhere.
You might also want to try running "aptitute" as the root user. This
does the same job as the apt-get program, but allows you to browse a
tree of available packages (text mode of course!). And once you've got
graphics running, there are a number of nice graphical applications to
do the same job.
Actually, it might be easier to try running the installer again this
time making sure you select a desktop package...
By the way, I hope you're installing Debian 3.1 (aka "sarge") not the
old Debian 3.0 (aka "woody") - the new release is a major improvement!
Regards,
Simon
Reply to: