laptop installation
Hi there. Long time debian user here, since slink... but I've run into some
problems recently. My laptop (Dell Inspiron 3200) has been kinda out of
action for the last 6 or 8 weeks with some video hardware problems, but now
those seem to be resolved after several trips to the Dell factory. Since I
got it back this past Tuesday, 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), and since I'm devoting
my laptop's entire hard drive to linux, this is the only way I decided I
could install debian. So I proceeded to install the base system off the
slink cd and configure it for network use so I could dist-upgrade from
there. Next, I thought it would be wise to dist-upgrade from slink to
potato, instead of right from slink to woody, so I did so. No problems
there. Things started getting really sketchy when I did the dist-upgrade
from potato to woody. Everything downloaded fine (using apt-get -f
dist-upgrade), but then it said it had to temporarily remove perl-base
before it could proceed, but it couldn't. Apt suggested I pass the
APT::Force-LoopBreak to apt-get (by using apt-get dist-upgrade -o
APT::Force-LoopBreak=yes) to force it to proceed. So I did, and it worked,
until it had to use some perl scripts that wanted IO.pm, and puked.
Everything stopped working then, because there were about 13 packages that
couldn't be configured (from base). What I didn't realize at the time,
however, was that IO.pm was a part of the actual perl package (perl5.6 in
woody's case, and perl-5.005 in potato's case), and not perl-base. Stupid
me, because I realized this right when I had to leave, so I would have to
start over the next day.
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 woody. I
remembered this time, however, to install the perl package before upgrading
in case anything needed it. The reason for not including this in the first
place was because I was just upgrading the base, without installing
anything extra at all, which I probably shouldn't have done. That's besides
the point though. Anyway, it seemed to work, because upgrading to woody now
found IO.pm and all the other stuff it needed to have. So that worked OK.
However, I then ran into another problem when dpkg was configuring
modutils. It couldn't finish configuring modutils, because there was this
little error:
error: QM_MODULES: function not implemented
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? Has anyone else run into this
problem yet? I'm almost considering switching back to slackware on my
laptop and using debian on my pc's, because it's there's just SO much
downloading involved with unstable (as always, and yes I'm used to it
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.
One final note... How would you guys recommend partitioning a 4gb hard
drive? :) 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 /, 1200mb /home, 1800mb /usr, 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). The rest (about 60mb) was devoted to swap. I
feel like I need to learn about partitioning schemes :).
Thanks for the help, and good luck to all you developers. I'll be joining
you soon ;)
- Jordan
webfreak@themes.org - email
http://e.themes.org - php developer (yes, i really am)
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