Re: install troubles

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Gene Heskett wrote:

>Greetings;
>
>I've just today, tried to install the 14 disk set
>
The first CD has the bulk of what you want. The next few CDs have other
software, in order of decreasing popularity. The last half or so of the
CDs are source code, which you probably don't want or need unless you're
going to be (re-)compiling the Debian packages for some reason.

If you have a broadband connection (or are willing to wait, and wait,
and wait, on a dial-up connection), you only need the one CD (or even
less, the netinst CD); after the basic install, you can pull everything
else directly from the net.


> is 3.1 (sarge) onto 
>a drive in a test box, but after the one disk was done, it asked to 
>be rebooted rather than asking for more disks, this despite my using 
>the 'expert26' install argument.
>  
>
The reboot is to make the kernel just recently installed on the hard
drive the active kernel, rather than running off the CD's kernel. Once
that reboot is done, you have a minimally basic system. Everything after
is pretty much just icing.

It's been forever since I've done a CD-based install, and never a
multi-CD based install, and never a Sarge CD-based install, but I
believe you'll need to tell the system about the other CDs by running
"apt-cdrom", which will prompt you to insert each CD in turn, which it
will read, thus making the packages on that CD available for installation.

Alternatively, and this is the way I do it, edit your
"/etc/apt/sources.list" file to point to a network repository instead of
to local CDs. Then you get the latest and greatest packages from the
network, instead of the 3-month or 10-month, etc, old versions that are
on your CDs.


>I spent the majority of the day wandering around in aptitude, both 
>looking for the everything option or trying to find both perl-5.8.x 
>  
>
I'm not sure about Sarge, but in Sid, it's just
  #aptitude search perl | grep 5
which seems to indicate that perl-5.6 is the most recent version
available. Sarge is likely to not even have that. To install the 5.6
version,
  #aptitude install perl-5.6

(In both of these cases, I'm using aptitude in its command-line mode
rather than it's "GUI" mode.)

>or enough x11 to get a gui running, without finding either.
>  
>
  #aptitude install x-window-system kde gnome icewm

should get you lots of GUI goodness and flavor.

-- 
Kent