reinstalling Debian - part I
Hi
I have an amd64 system that is still dualboot with XP. It has a 100GB
FAT32 that i use as my "/home" but since i barely use XP anymore and i
had some issues with FAT32 i'm gonna resize my 20GB XP partition (oh,
wait, i have game isos...) and change the fat to ext3. Also, my system
got infected with this virus called gnome, which is really hard to get
rid off. I hear KDE is the same and with so much X experimenting i'm
not sure anymore which session/display/window/file/___managers i have
and which are default. It's annoying. I also surely have some lost and
unused packages and i could use some tweaking as far as partition
sizes go, so, this implies repartition and reformat anyway.
Before i do that, i want some advice. Here are the specs:
power supply: 400W
motherboard: Asus M2NPV-VM
processor: AMD Athlon64 3500+ (2.2GHZ PIB SOCKET AM2 512KB CACHE)
RAM: 2x Kingston 1G DDR2 800MHz CL5 (with two empty slots)
hard-drive: Maxtor 160GB SATA II 7200RPM 8Mb Cache
DVD: LG RW GSA-H10A (never used it in Debian yet actually)
There are 3 other computers, two debians wired to the NAT router,
another wireless with Vista (i'm thiking printers and Samba later).
Starting with general questions, one of my future projects will be to
fiddle around with Linux from Scratch. The thing is, if i compile
everything, will i be able to compile a package manager and use it to
manage everything i've already compiled? If not i'm stuck with a
system that's not easily upgradable (although that's not the point
with LFS).
Religious question #1: which PM to use? I mostly use APT and i'm quite
happy with it. Aptitude seemed ok. I want automatic removal of unused
packages and whatever else is there to make management easy.
Religious question #2: Display Manager. XDM does the job and i guess
with some fiddling it could even become pretty. I have other machines,
only one monitor and i'm lazy. I can get away with openSSH but i'd
like to open a window on my desktop and connect to the other boxes. I
did it once!! So, i'd like to use the same DM in all machines, one
that will later allow me to remote session. I think SDM is
discontinued (used SSH - i don't need it on my local network but its
fun), i refuse to use GDM or KDM since i dislike the corresponding
desktop enviroments (although i'm now using gdm). So... unless(?) i go
for VNC i'd like a DM that can handle XDMCP.
And the difference between a display manager and a session manager?
Languages and i18n. My mother tongue is NOT english. I'm ok with it
being the system language, i actually like the interface to be
english, since i don't really appreciate other translations, but i
want to be able to use the system (keyboard et al) for my own language
(portuguese), as well as others (esperanto and russian). I want to be
able to have filenames with portuguese accented letters, cyrillic or
hebrew characters if i freaking want to - and use them on the console.
Admitedly i ran into most problems with the FAT32 partition, but i
still get a lot of garble.
How can i guarantee a default Unicode system? Which brings us to the
next question.
Fonts. While fiddling with the default X meta-package (oh :(, i'd
forgotten about that) i ran into 3 different locations for fonts.
Apapretly Xfs is deprecated. I want my fonts to be central and
unicode, available to all programs, at least. I don't want fonts that
are not unicode - any tweaks?
Short of compiling it how can i assure that my X server will be
adapted to my hardware? It often installs drivers for a bunch of cards
unnecessarily, for instance. And this motherboard has an onborad
nVidia chip which i'd like to use to the max (and how could i test
that?). Also i know this monitor (Samtron 55E) supports more than
800x600 resolutions, but i can't really know if it's using something
above that. Also there doesn't seem to be a standard as fas as icons
(and its size/behaviour) go...
The installation: i want to be sure i'll only instal the most basic
packages, the "minimal" system. I could use the netinst CD i used last
time (May) but it would be interesting to use a USB pen-drive. I have
a 2GB Kingston, i assume that's feasable.
As far as general questions go, that's it for now i guess. All
cronstructive criticism is welcome. Next wil be partitions :-)
Cheers,
Nuno
--
Fica bem, porta-te mal.
Be well, misbehave.
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