Re: netinstall basically, well, F****D up.
There's quite a lot involved in what you did I'm not knowledgeable
about, and you didn't mention why you attempted to do it this way, so
perhaps I'll be speaking past you, but...
You bypassed most of the install logic for Debian. If you did a similar
thing attempting to change between other distros, you'd be bypassing the
installer logic for that distro as well. Download boot floppies, or the
first CD and do the install from them.
Is your personal data in a separate partition, that is, is /home it's
own partition?
What else are you attempting to preserve in (what turns out to be) an
upgrade? Knowing that, someone may be able to offer advice about how to
do that.
If it's only your email and personal files, I recommend backing them up
and letting Debian [SuSE | Mandrake | RedHat | Gentoo | etc. ] go
through it's designed install process. None of the distros handles
everything the same way. That's why they forked.
After the system is up, then you can import your mail and files again,
and deal with any UID/permissions issues separately.
I'd elect to initialize all standard filesystems (/, /opt, /var, swap)
except /home. If you can back up /home and you want to change it's file
system type (say ext2 to ext3 or whatever) then I'd initialize it too,
but otherwise I keep it intact in upgrade/distro changes.
But keep in mind there are many settings kept in .whatever_conf files in
/home/<user_name> that affect how things work, so you might be best
getting them out of the way. The settings for Mandrake may not be right
for Debian. If nothing else, many parts are put in different places
(proprietary choices again). You can copy /home elsewhere, or move all
of /home to /home/old_home (and make sure nothing's left behind in /home
itself except for old_home) before starting the install.
I'm running a personal laptop, and I have /, swap, /home, and two
Window$ partitions: /windows/c and /windows/d. During the Debian
install, there's an *alternate* choice, after mounting and initializing
/, to mount any existing partitions. That's where I specify my /home
and /windows/... partitions. Alternate means it doesn't come up during
the normal progression - you have to go and look for it. Right after
mounting / is the right time to do this.
LILO and Grub have no problem with 1024 cylinder limits now (AFAIK), so
there's no real need to keep a /boot down low on the HD. If you're
running a mailserver or such, there are reasons to make other choices,
but if you're running a mailserver or such, you've probably read about
that.
If you've got something else you're trying to preserve, like an Oracle
install or such, let us know so someone can mention how to handle that.
Part of the reason I ultimately chose Debian is that advice in How-tos
and on the web didn't seem to work with other distros, because they make
proprietary choices - files are named differently, located somewhere
else, boot scripts are different. Debian seems the most "standard" of
the well-supported distro projects.
That means there are big differences between all the distros, and I
think it's unreasonable to expect the pieces from one distro to all work
with another. Let the installer do it's job.
Cheers,
Bret
On Sat, 2003-07-19 at 09:10, Lars Unin wrote:
> > Well, maybe you could tell us what choices you make during the install,
> > and how...tasksel? dselect? What do you choose?
> >
> > Otherwise a bit difficult to tell what you're doing that doesn't work...
> > Please respond to the list, so others can help as well.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Bret
>
> I'll give it a shot
> I chose:(in order)
> put root.bin, linux.bin, rescue.bin from 2.4.18-bf. in /boot/newinstall
> change LILO
> restart
> U.K
> U.k keyboard
> initialise a already made swap
> initialise HDA5 (thats my new dedicated root partition 2gig)
> chose Ext2 (when something works well, stick with it, I say)
> exit installer and reboot
>
> go into Mandrake, extract 2.4.18-bf modules into
> new root partition on HDA5,
>
> restart installer
> go to ASH insmod pegasus
> network download options now work
> IT downloads floppy images
> IT downloads a base system, and it doesn't let me choose;
> Woody with a 2.2 kernel is to hard to configure with
> the pegasus network USB-->ETH connector
> It brings up Dselect and then tasksel .e.t.c.
> It does have a network package installed, but its to hard
> to configure DHCLIENT,
> I wish it worked like it does in the installer
>
> Other stuff you might want to know,
> its a broadband network connection;
> in the installer It configured it by asking the NTL
> DHCP server for relevent info,
> in mandrake I work it by using
> dhcpcd <--- Much better, and easier.
>
> But woody uses 2.2 which is alas,crappy as is DHCLIENT,
> does anyone know how to get DHCLIENT to query the NTL
> DHCP server for info so I can get it working, or alternatively
> get the 2.4.18-bf hard disk netinstall to download a 2.4 based
> stable system, or maybe a unstable system?
>
> ===
> Lars
> --
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