Re: Where to start
Rocky Ou wrote:
Hey list... I'm going to install Debian sid on my Dell inspiron 2200
laptop to make it a dual-boot machine. Can any of you give me some
suggestions regarding to the following issues before I dive into
installation process?
1. I have ADSL access at the normal speed of 50kB/S. Do I need to
download full set CD? I saw somebody says Just need to download
few of them. Which CD should I download? If you could give me a
URL for downloading the necessary CDS, I would really appreciate it?
All you need is the netinstall CD, which has just enough information to
get your machine on the network, at which point any additional pieces of
Debian can be downloaded, both for the remainder of the base (minimal)
installation and for any of the other 15000 or so Debian packages. On
the debian.org homepage, on the left, is a link to "Network Install",
which will take you to the Stable netinstall CD and to a link to
unofficial testing netinstall CDs (which will lead you to
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/; you'll probably want the
i386 netinst image; don't forget to burn it as an image rather than as
data or you'll just burn another coaster).
1. Besides back up important info under Windows XP, What are the
issues I must address?
You'll want to chkdsk and defrag your drive, trying to get all your
Windows stuff to the front end of the drive (or back end, if you
prefer). Then you'll need to split your Windows partition, using such a
tool as Partition Magic or --- ah! my brain just went blank; there's a
couple of free tools on the Linux side that will do this, but like I
say, my brain just went blank on their names.
1. I want to have a place where both Windows and Debian can have
access, How can I do it if it is possible?
When you partition your drive, you'll probably want a minimum of four
partitions:
1) one for Windows, presumably NTFS
2) one for sharing between the two systems, which would need to be FAT32
3) one for the Debian system's root (" / ") partition, which could be
ext2, ext3, reiser, etc (I generally opt for ext3, but others will chime
in at this point I'm sure)
4) and one for swap, generally about twice the amount of RAM in your
box, but that's just a general rule of thumb
I personally like to break my / partition into more partitions, such as
one for /home, one for /tmp, one for /usr, one for /var, and one for
/usr/local. There are advantages and disadvantages to this; you may want
to read up on the pros and cons. You could also use what I believe is
called LVM (Logical Volume Mounting or something similar); this is a
"virtual" partition, sort of, which allows you to create and modify
partitions inside this virtual partition non-destructively. As you can
tell, I'm really not familiar with it, but it also has some advantages,
so you might want to look into this also, although I'd just use normal
partitions as I already understand those and therefore that would be one
less learning curve for me.
1. Right now it seems Unstable (sid) does not have CD image to
downlod. Can I use Testing CD to install and change the
sources.list after Debian is runing on my machine?
Yes. After changing the sources.list, you'd want to run "aptitude
update" followed by "aptitude dist-upgrade" in order to bring your
system up to Sid.
--
Kent
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