Installation of Sid from CD
Hi,
for everyone who had problems with the installation of Sid from CD a short report about
my attempts and the meanwhile resolved problems with it.
I'm not a Linux but a Debian novice who wanted to look at Debian a bit closer.
Because of the actuality of the software I wanted to install Sid directly in spite of the
word "unstable". So I got the 11 CDs of this distribution.
Unfortunately I had to realize that it's not possible to install Sid directly from CD. First
the keyboard detection fails what's fixed in the meantime as I heard and second there's
only an option to start a shell instead of the options to partition the harddisk and to
install the system. The selection of a kernel (e.g. bf24) and the specification of boot
parameters wasn't possible, too, when booting from CD.
Because of this I (perforce) got the 7 CDs of the Woody to give at least the installation
of this distribution a trial what's initially worked easily but after the package installation
with dselect led to problems.
Then I stroke on the idea initially only to install a minimalistic system of Woody, then to
upgrade this to Sid and then to install the remaining packages.
Before and between that I had of course read some documentations and newsgroup
and mailing list articles.
The installation of the minimalistic system of the Woody and the upgrade of this
minimalistic system to Sid was no problem.
Before the upgrade I adapted the file /etc/apt/sources.list with apt-cdrom add to the CDs
of the Sid.
Nevertheless the installation of the packages wasn't possible because too many errors
appeared so that dselect aborted the installation.
I also stood out that dselect notified me about far too many package dependencies for a
normal installation and wanted to install quite a few .udeb packages. Errors appeared
mainly with the installation of these packages.
Because I at first put these problems down to a faulty or inaccurate documentation I
then turned to the e-mail address debian-doc@lists.debian.org mentioned in the
documentation.
By the way in the meantime I heard that it's a mailing list which is intended for quite
technical discussions about the documentation.
Owing to Jens Seidel's intensive help and commitment for which I want to thank him
here, too, we together found out that these installation problems based on a bug in the
programm apt-cdrom that when starting apt-cdrom add inserted a directory too much in
each entry for every CD-ROM into the file /etc/apt/sources.list.
After a bug report by Jens Seidel this bug is meanwhile fixed by the developers of this
programm. The new faultless version 0.5.12 of apt is already as a package on the FTP
servers and included in Sid. Shortly it will be included in Sarge, too.
As a workaround for this bug you can remove the directory main/debian-installer from
every entry in the file /etc/apt/sources.list by hand.
There shall be older versions which contain a directory named something with "udeb".
These directories are to be removed, too.
Here is the guide to the error free installation for everyone who also wants to install Sid
from CD but still has the CDs with the faulty apt-cdrom.
1. Install Woody from CD-ROM as explained in the installation manual but without
execution of tasksel and dselect at the end. (Only CD 1 is needed.)
2. Execute the command 'lilo'. If necessary customize the file '/etc/lilo.conf' before.
3. Restart the computer with the command 'reboot'.
4. Scan every CD of Sid one after the other starting with the last CD (CD 11) backwards
to the first CD (CD 1) with the command 'apt-cdrom add'.
5. Remove the lines for the Woody CDs in the file '/etc/apt/sources.list'.
6. Remove the strings " main/debian-installer" from the lines for the Sid-CDs in the file
'/etc/apt/sources.list'.
7. Remove every CD from the CD-ROM drives! If necessary execute the command
'umount' for every CD-ROM drive before!
8. Execute the command 'apt-get update'.
9. Execute the command 'apt-get -u dist-upgrade'.
10. Execute the command 'lilo'. If necessary customize the file '/etc/lilo.conf' before.
11. Restart the computer with the command 'reboot'.
12. Start the programm 'dselect', enter every menu item one after the other and follow
the instructions on the screen each time.
Now Sid should have been installed completely with all selected packages as
requested!
I had only one error with the installation of the package kdirstat 2.3.7-1 in Sid since it's
nothing to speak of for a successful Debian/Sid installation. It should be possible to
install this package without a problem later.
Good luck with the installation!
Heiko
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