Re: Great Debian experience
On Wed, 19 Mar 2014 07:25:44 -0400 (EDT)
Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Mar 2014 14:31:46 -0400 (EDT), Steve Litt wrote:
> >
> > ...
> > I also unchecked the Debian Desktop selection.
> > ...
> > Then I did the following:
> >
> > apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies
> > apt-get install synaptic
> > apt-get install iceweasel
> > ...
>
> I realize that this is too late for this install, but maybe it will
> help you next time. Also, maybe it will help someone else. Try
> this. When you get the initial boot screen from the Debian
> installer, press F1 for help, then at the boot prompt type:
>
> expert desktop=xfce
>
> and press Enter. Do *not* uncheck the desktop selection in the
> tasksel menu during installation. The installer will install the
> xfce desktop.
>
> There's more than one way to do this, but this may be the quickest
> way. You can also add whatever other Debian installer options, kernel
> boot parameters, or environment variable values that you want to use
> on this line.
Thanks Stephen!
I'll recommend this to people. If and when I change my style of booting
to CLI and then typing startx, this is the way I'll do it myself.
I should probably explain my propensity to install a base system, get
it running, and then use the package manager to add the rest. It comes
from long years of usage of Red Hat, Caldera, Mandrake/Mandriva, and
Ubuntu. On those distros, there was the very real possibility that
installation would stall or produce a nonbootable system. So what I
always do is install a non-X system with little but ssh server added
to the defaults, get that installed, and then, from a nice, stable OS,
use the package manager for the rest. This level of paranoia might not
be necessary with Debian, but I don't yet completely trust its
installation procedure.
Relatedly, this past experience of hanging installations is one
reason I greatly prefer CLI or nCurses installations to GUI ones. CLI
installs are more likely to complete, and are MUCH more likely to
install on a resource starved machine. I recently installed Debian, via
the network install, on a machine with 128MB of RAM. No other complete
Linux that I tried would go that low.
Thanks, and I'll always keep F1 and then expert desktop=xfce in mind.
SteveT
Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
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