Re: debian installation
pplaw wrote:
> debs,
>
> for all it's worth, i've tried the floppies, countless downloads, and,
> recently--today, the cd's; and all i have to show for the last 3 months is a box that
> boots linux, with no xwindows and no internet, yet.
>
> i'll be glad when i get there.
Bentley,
If you've been trying three months without success, I suspect that you really will be
glad when you get there. :-)
I'm no expert, but I used the following email to get a relative with a very small drive
started on Debian. I don't know if anything in it will help you, but if you pick up
even one pointer i'ts worth the bandwidth. Naturally this was for a very small drive, so
there's a lot that isn't included; but once you get the system running you can use
dselect to add whatever else you need/want.
John
P.S. this was based on the cheapbytes Slink CD
----------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,
I've been thinking about your small hard drive and decided to find out what the minimum
Linux load could be and still use "Xwindows". After some testing I came up with the
following plan. You'll only be loading apx 160-170 packages out of the over 2300
available, but it'll run fine on less than 200 MB. It even has a few games to play and a
few graphics programs to sample.
I think you said that you had a 200+ mb and an 85mb hard drive available. You could put
both in your computer and use the 85 (or part of it) as the swap space. (the less memory
you have in your computer, the more important the swap space is - 32MB should work fine
with this small installation)
Guidelines follow:
NOTE: before starting you should know which graphic card /monitor you have and what the
frequencies are. Follow the step-by-step procedures on the CD and use the
hints/procedures below. These directions are based on only using one drive, if you use
two make the entire primary drive one partition.
============================================
"How to make a small penguin"
1. Put "Binary 1" disk in your CDROM and boot from the CD.
2. Follow the step-by-step procedure.
3. When you get to the page "Initialize and Activate a swap Partition" for the first
time, select "Partition a Hard Drive"
4. Delete all old partitions and make two new primary partitions. Partition (1) should
be FS type Linux, bootable, beginning of disk, and it's size should be all
but the space required for swap. Partition (2) should be FS Linux swap and use all the
remaining space. Write it to disk when you have it where you want it.
5. When you get to the page where you select device drivers, the only drivers you need
are "vfat" under FS, and "lp" under misc.
6. Select "Y" when asked if you want to chose from several selection of packages.
7. Select "Basic" from menu.
8. When 'dselect' starts and the first line "0. [A]ccess ..." is highlighted, put
"Binary 2" CD in your CDROM. You're going to do all the steps 0-6 even though the
previous page said to skip [S]elect.
9. In "0. [A]ccess" type none for non-free, non-US, and Local.
10. In "2. [S]elect" you'll scroll through a list of some 2300+ packages. You can tell
which ones are already selected by the asterisk (*) before the name of the
package, an unselected package has a dash (-). We're going to add some packages to the
basic system. You add the package by pressing the (+). When you
add a package, the deselect program warns you if the package you select depends on other
packages to run properly. It puts the "conflict/dependency" page on the screen and (when
you press the space bar) it lists what the conflicts are and/or adds whatever packages
your selection needs. All you have to do is accept deselect's choices by pressing enter.
In a few instances below, I'll tell you to add a package to deselects choices. They'll
all show on the dependency page as recommended but not selected - you'll have to select
them.
Scroll down through the list and add the following:
opt comm wvdial (only if you need a modem)
opt games xbill
opt games xdemineur
opt games xfishtank
opt games xjewel
opt games xpat2
opt games xroach
opt graphics gimp
opt graphics imagemagik
opt graphics pixmap
opt graphics xbmbrowser (add netpbm)
opt oldlibs nextaw (add nextawg)
opt text magicfilter (only if you need printer)
opt web gzilla (only if you need small browser)
opt x11 fvwm95
opt x11 tkdesk (add tkstep4.2)
opt x11 xf86setup (add the xserver you need for your graphics card) and (add
xfonts-scalable)
11. Compete the rest of the installation and set-up.
Note: during the set-up it'll ask you if you want xserver_vga16 to be primary - the
answer is no. You want the xserver that your card needs to be primary. In my case it's
xserver_svga, your xserver depends on your graphics card.
12. Sign on as root.
13. When you get a command prompt, type XF86Setup <enter>. Set up your mouse, keyboard
and xwindows.
14. When XF86Setup is complete (hopefully), type startx <enter>
With any luck at all, you should how have a running linux operating system. You can now
tweak a few items to make life easier. You can try my hints to start
with and then change things to suit yourself. Linux is very changeable.
-------------------------------------------
Start by setting up "tkdesk", it's both a file browser (explorer) and editor. Use the
taskbar start-xshells-tkdesk.
Once tkdesk is running, edit the options by selecting the following and unselecting
everything else - you'll probably set it up differently when you get used to it, but
these selections work well.
long listings
show all files
folders on top
single click (Dirs)
Sort by ... name
ask on delete
sort history
dialogs at pointer
number of list boxes (2)
balloon help
Using the TkDesk dropdown menu at the top left, toggle or hide the AppBar (you don't
need it with fvwm95 - it already has a button bar). Now size it
accordingly and enjoy.
---------------------------------------
Once you get used to tkdesk, you can edit a few files to make your linux more friendly.
The files that you need to edit are:
/root/.bashrc
(1) change the line (export PS1='\h:\w\$') to read (export PS1='\$'). Unless, of course,
you like the trash prior to the command prompt. ;-)
(2) remove the # sign in front of the five lines beginning with (#export
LS_OPTIONS......)
(3) (save it)
/root/.profile
Change your path by adding (:/usr/games) to the end of the line starting with
(PATH=/usr.......) and save it. (Your games won't work from the menu until you edit your
path)
/etc/X11/fvwm95/system.fvwm95rc
If you want your taskbar to autohide edit this file and scroll down to almost the end of
the file. Look for the heading (#------------------FvwmTaskBar). At the
bottom of a list of item under that heading you'll find the following line.
#*FvwmTaskBarAutoHide
Remove the #.
-------------------------------------------
Good Luck
P.S. to shut down linux use the command "shutdown -h now", don't just turn it off..
========================================================
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