Re: laptop installation
[Mucho trimming - to summarize..]
> ... . My laptop (Dell Inspiron 3200)
> ... , I've been attempting to get debian back on
> it and up to a usable state of woody (heh). I was doing this from school,
> where they have a 100mbps microwave connection to the school's local isp,
> so I was averaging about 85-90k/s from eecs.umich.edu ;).
>
> Anyway, these are my problems. The only debian cd I have in posession is an
> old-as-mud slink cd (which btw uses kernel 2.0.36),
Err, since you're installing from bare metal anyway, do you have a CD burner
handy anywhere, even on a Windows or Mac nearby? Because, you could fetch
the potato ISOs with that kind of bitspeed.
Failing this, I recommend that you can install from the CD you have, then
take the plunge in *much* smaller chunks.
First, upgrade you slink-antique to the newest slink, by using either a
mirror that still carries slink (it would have to be at least partially
mirroring debian-archives, now) or the real debian ftp site.
One difficulty you'll have is that my favorite toy, console-apt, probably
won't work until you grab a number of additional loose parts. However,
I do know that it works with slink for the following values: console-apt
0.6.5.3-1 worked on a somewhat newer slink (around the time they were
starting to press slink-and-a-half, I think) and that's what I used to
start snacking on potato.
Critical: DO NOT use the keyword "stable". Use the keyword "slink" and
chase down an archive that has it, until you get your slink
un-rusted.
> So I started over (today). I had slink already installed before I got to
> school, so all I had to do was dist-upgrade to potato and then woo0dy. I
> remembered this time, however, ... perl ... modutils ...
Hopefully a dist-upgrade to slink (as stored on the open net -archives-)
will make this easier. Clean up any messes that leaves you in.
Then dist-upgrade to slink-proposed-updates, using the same archive areas
as you had to for slink. That should get you at slink r6 or maybe slightly
better.
There is a document on the debian website on gotchas to look out for, for
slink users upgrading to potato. Errr... at least, I saw it up awhile back,
I don't think it was two months ago... I don't seem to easily find it now -
darnit, that really torq's my gourd. Um, I might be able to hunt up a
local copy of it. But you have definitely pegged two of its warnings right
on the head.
In fact, I will add from personal experience, be really-really careful
upgrading your perl from 5.004 (I think that is what you'll end up with as
base) to 5.005 even, and clean up all its little messes before you even
consider adding any additional versions of perl. You might have to do
some package forcing to get the dependencies to settle in.
There is a potato-proposed-updates too. I now keep security.debian.org
on my apt-sources list.
> I have a strong urge to think this has something to do with the existing
> kernel on my system, which had been installed from slink's 2.0.36 base
> installation. Am I correct in assuming this, and do I need to start over
> again after upgrading the system to a 2.2 kernel before dist-upgrading to
> woody so it'll be able to configure modutils?
Rebooting the system would be good, but rebuilding the whole install should
not be necessary. I was running slink happily on a locally built 2.2.x for
a while before the potato builds were getting safe. The idea is that modutils
are supposed to be smart enough to deal with the differences...
...though I'd welcome anyone else's comments on whether they still handle
2.0.x properly.
At the very least the slink archives have a 2.0.38 kernel image available,
and there's a source kit for 2.2.5 in slink-proposed-updates.
> because I used potato in unstable state for a long long time), and my
> laptop isn't all that fast (p2-266 on 64mb of ram). Suggestions are welcome.
Mine's a 233-MMX and quite happy on potato, thanks. It's not the speed,
it's the latency ...
Anyways, once you're safely on potato, get yourself console-apt (if you
haven't already). BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM very neatly to some media you can
get it back from, since you're going to be playing with woody and it's
been living up to the term "unstable" lately... so this way you can go
back to a healthy potato over and over instead of driving yourself nuts
like this.
Then you can use console-apt to snag little things at a time. Be really
careful when handleing glibc - read the devel list and keep up on who
clutzed out during uplaods, etc.
> One final note... How would you guys recommend partitioning a 4gb hard
> drive? :)
With at least a seperate /tmp, 100 to 300 Mb would be fine. Less might
be okay even, depends on whether you use apps that bloat /tmp. Since I
don't trust apps, I think a little extra space is okay.
> I don't really want to use one big partition, which I've been
> doing for a long time, so I decided to split it up this installation. I
> tried an 800mb /,
huge, mine is only 120 Mb and not in real danger of growing full. I
usually format / with less "space reserved for root" because, um, very few
things are writing to it that aren't root.
> 1200mb /home, 1800mb /usr,
I'd probably merge these and symlink /home to /usr/local/home. You can
format this with lots of inodes if you like.
> and 250mb /var (which actually
> isn't big enough since downloading deb packages can take well over 300mb,
> so that'll HAVE to be bigger).
ok size, if you symlink /var/cache/apt to something like /usr/local/AptCache
and /var/lib/dpkg to /usr/local/Dpkg (note the caps, they sort to the top
in listings - you could make them dot-directories, but then you might forget
to back up the packaging system). I also format /var with less "space
reserved for root" because, frankly, nearly all the run-off-at-the-mouth
logs are written as root anyway. Grr.
> The rest (about 60mb) was devoted to swap. I
> feel like I need to learn about partitioning schemes :).
Looks like a good swap size to me.
don't forget to let your laptop format its hibernate space :)
> Thanks for the help, and good luck to all you developers. I'll be joining
> you soon ;)
>
> - Jordan
Welcome to the list, Jordan :)
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
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