Re: FW: New to debian and overwhelmed.
Hello
Jack Falstaff (<jackfalstaff@sbcglobal.net>) wrote:
>
> I'm new to debian, but not linux. I've installed and ran RH, SuSE and
> Slackware(ran this one for five years) and I will need some hand
> holding with this distribution. Installation is turning out to be a
> nightmare. For the last attempt I defined a partition scheme as
> follows:
>
> / 100M
> /swap 512M
> /boot 15M
> /usr 5G
> /usr/local 5G
> /var 7G
> /tmp 100M
> /home The remaining part of a 30G drive, approx 12G
>
> Should not have been a problem, right? All of it went well, but at
> the end of the package installation it reported broken packages so I
> tried to reinstall them. The result was not only a failure, but
> without me altering anything in dselect, it installed an additional
> 700M. At the end of that, it reported the original broken packages,
> plus some additionals I never selected to install.
The first question is: which version of Debian did you try to install?
The second question is: How did you try to install? (CD/DVD/Inet)
The third question is: Did you choose to use dselect at the end of the
installation to install further packages, and is this where the first
problems occured?
> So I tried then to uninstall all the broken packages, and install some
> others, and it seemed to go okay, though the amount of disk space
> required, as reported by dselect was exceptionally high. After
> this it reported raidtools as broken, which I thought odd since I
> don't have a RAID setup. Regardless, this process went round and
> round and eventually, without any intervention by me except to press
> the enter key for the dialog boxes, it installed until it overflowed a
> 5G /usr partition.
Debian packages know three grades of dependencies:
depends
suggests
recommends
If you install packages by using dselect, maybe the programm choose to
install dependencies from all grades. Try to skip dselect and tasksel
after the installation. You can use them later if you want. Maybe you
should take a look at aptitude. It is much easier to use than dselect.
Install it:
apt-get install aptitude
> Why is the setup/package installation system installing things I
> didn't ask for?
>
> I've increased the /usr partition to 7G this time,
The base system size for Woody is about 120 MB.
> but I'm not looking forward to another 12 hour installation while
> debian's install system decides I need raidtools, or Atlas-3DNow(which
> won't run on my system because I only have PIII 800s).
First of all, if you downloaded packages, check if they are still in
/var/cache/apt/archives. If yes, save them, e.g. to your home folder.
That way you can reinstall without downloading them again. Just copy
them back to /var/cache/apt/archives after installing the base system.
best regards
Andreas Janssen
--
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674
Registered Linux User #267976
http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps.html
Reply to: