stephan.sens wrote:
Dear Russell, Thank you very much for your help, indeed! Having a broadband connection, I am going to 'install from network' as you suggested as 'best' approach. Thanks again for you advise with the O'Reilly's books. All the bestStephan
Dear Stephan,Thanks for the note. I have done numerous network installations of Debian; changing CDs is tedious. From start to finish, plan to spend about four hours, including an hour in which the machine is doing nothing but downloading files. Then you likely shall spend another full day loading and configuring application packages according to your use of the machine. My work is primarily composition and typesetting, and setting up a comprehensive and comfortable working environment with Xemacs and LaTeX takes a while.
The tedious part of any installation is partitioning the drive, because there are many trade-offs. This comes about primarily because experienced Linux users typically set up separate partitions for the major directories (boot, root ("/"), home, var, tmp, and usr). However, there is no universally-accepted rule to follow regarding the size to make each partition, so deciding upon the proper sizes can be particularly troubling to the newcomer to Linux. This matter caused me endless concern, until I finally decided that the best way to determine the required partition sizes is simply to install Linux, run it for a month or so, and see how much drive space is used for each partition. Then reinstall Linux, setting partition sizes according to your actual personal requirements. To make sure that this scheme works properly, the first (trial) installation should put all the major directories (home, var, temp, user, etc.) into one large partition, so that each directory can grow as large as necessary while you are installing packages. It is good to check the partitions from time to time, making a note of the used/free ratio for each, so that you can intelligently increase or decrease partition sizes at the next installation. Though Debian in easily upgraded without the necessity of reinstalling the system, I've found it beneficial to reinstall the system every year or two. This gives me the opportunity to adjust partition sizes; but more importantly, it is an opportunity to look over the packages which are installed and to clean out old packages for which I no longer have need -- a "spring cleaning".
RLH