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The Very Verbose Debian 3.0 Installation Walkthrough
Gentu writes "Cited the general displeasure which accompanied the Debian 3.0 release, mostly regarding its dated installation procedure, Clinton De Young wrote an easy-reading but long article for OSNews going through the Debian installation step by step. Of course Progeny released recently the PGI graphical installer, but it is not as complete as the current Debian text-based installer and it will definately be quite some time before it get adopted by the project."
I found debian's own installation guide to be extensive enough
-dk
I am in no way a linux guru and/or expert, in-fact I am about as wet behind the ears as you can get. Debian comes off as being one of those distros that you should only bother installing if you are in-the-know. I have been very curious about debian for a while now and have always went the RH or slackware and mandrake route beacause of the ease of install. I have to admit though that, A) this article helps TONS & B) debian has gotten much better for us newbs. This is a MUST read!!!
> Of course Progeny released recently the PGI
> graphical installer, but it is not as complete as
> the current Debian text-based installer
More importantly, it's i386 only.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
On my house mail server, that's a different story. I'm running Debian on an old P133. Debian made it really easy to install a totally stripped down system and exim configuration beats the *#@$* out of sendmail configuration as far as I'm concerned.
The debian install isn't bad at all if you're FAMILIAR with linux and know what you're doing. People complain it isn't as nice as Mandrake install. Guess what, Debian is put out by hobbyists and not by a commercial company. The focus is on functionality, NOT GUI interface design.
Debian isn't shooting for the average Joe Schmo linux desktop user. I think Debian is great for systems when you want TOTALLY cutting edge (unstable gets updated all the time and installing new packages over the net is a breeze), when you want just a few precisely chosen packages, or when running headless.
My largest complaint about Debian isn't about the installer per se, it's about X windows and fonts. Basically, I apt-get install gnome etc... and I have no idea what is up with the font situation. It use to be that you didn't even have truetype and had to fuck around for hours to get basic truetype working. I have no idea what the situation is with anti-aliasing and gnome 2.
But watch the criticism of Debian. Debian is a free product that is remarkably functional. It literally amazes me that anything in Debian works at all (and for the most part, everything does *with a lil tweakin*). Unless you start paying money for Debian GUI development, watch your tongue :P You're not ENTITLED to completely free operating system with a nice graphical installer!
This installer is modularised, using udebs (micro debs) to extend its functionality. Currently bootable on i386 and s390 but probably not usable to do a complete install yet.
The Progeny-developed discover tool, similar to Red Hat's kudzu, is being used for hardware autodetection by the installer. But the Progeny installer itself seems to be not very useful to create a fully-fledged installer - it does not even have support for non-ext2 filesystems!
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
USB devices are PnP, given that USB service itself is installed/configured. And on Debian, load those modules: /etc/modules and running /etc/init.d/modutils, and you'll be set. The remaining step is to actually plug the thing in the port, as you mentionned :-)
input
mousedev
hid
usbcore
usb-uhci
buy putting them in
have you been defaced today?
Finally, we just tried all the drivers, one by one, until the right one didn't fail on load.
This doesn't address the general issue, of course, but it's a very useful tidbit for your future information:
If you're trying to figure out what driver to use for a semi-unknown card, you can often get some really good hints by running "lspci". It just lists everything that the PCI bus reports on it. "lspci -v" gives a bit more information. I find that 99 times out of 100 I can just look at the information reported and narrow down the list of possible drivers to just two or three.
After that, of course, modprobing them one by one is the simplest way to figure out what's likely to work, but it's a lot easier with a smaller list.
Failing that, I've resorted in the past to writing a little 'for' loop in bash to just load every driver in the directory, then running 'lsmod' to see what managed to load. Something like:
...executed in the directory with all of the network modules is butt-ugly, has numerous problems... and very often works like a charm ;-)
Not newbie-friendly, though. But for me, like many I know who were around during the bad old days of Windows driver hell (Win95 to early Win98), I have a visceral fear of automagic hardware detection, and I would *much* rather just configure it myself, thank you. That way I know what is getting loaded, and when, and why.
Heck, I even tend to configure my kernels with everything as a module just so I can tell what drivers are being used and what aren't.
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You're right, default kernel is 2.2.x based but there's 2.4.18 based installation kernel too. With newer PC's you can choose which image load from the CD or if you're computer doesn't support that, you can make boot floppies w/ 2.4.18 as usual. And even if you installed it with 2.2.x, just apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18 afterwards if you don't want to compile your own kernel.
MS has this thing called the Generic HID driver, it allows for darn near any analog input device to be plugged into the computer and work somehow.
TWAIN, scanners;
VESA, Video (though really a new 2D API needs to be made up and widely implemented. . .
Monitor refresh rates and such can also be communicated automatically to the operating system.
Now Linux can, to one degree or another, do the rest of those just fine (no idea about TWAIN support, then again, TWAIN is not exactly the best standard in the world. . . . icky icky baaa d standard), the USB mouse should come come naturally.
Actually I think that USB mice should be in the same place that PS/2 mice are supported at, the BIOS. (heya, USB keyboards are supported in the BIOS. . . . heh)
Then again, I do not actually own a USB mouse sooooo;
just mostly the idea that adding a USB mouse is such a hassle that the author of the walk through omitted it. Even if manual configuration is necessary, it should not be that long to explain.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
It's impossible to mix+match packages.
Not anymore...
I run a mixed testing/unstable system this way, and it works for me.
Thanks for the info.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Please don't take my comments the wrong way...You're preaching to the converted, but I really believe these items are essential to a newbies guide to installing Debian.
.config file is in the /boot directory and doesn't come with the source, (c) figure out that he needs to "make oldconfig" (if he is used to "make menuconfig" as I was, he'll need to discover "apt-get install libncurses5-dev"), (d) deal with the regular Nvidia installation problems. Yes, I know this is all Nvidia's fault, but it's much more complex than "urpmi NVIDIA*.rpm" and should really be mentioned. I don't have an ATI card, but I would bet that their binary drivers are equally problematic.
/etc/modutils/ directory, then running "update-modules". (Perhaps I brought this upon myself by recompiling the Kernel, but I don't believe that is the case.)
The problem with Nvidia drivers is much worse than with the commercial distros.. A newbie would have to (a) figure out how to install the kernel source, (b) figure out that the kernel
My CD-RW experience required not only editing lilo.conf (obvious as you mentioned), but also adding:
alias scd0 sr_mod
pre-install sg modprobe ide-scsi
pre-install sr_mod modprobe ide-scsi
Somewhere in the
But the worst of all is not mentioning hdparm... A fresh Debian install crawls without UDMA enabled. It's a configuration issue, not an install issue, but it should certainly be mentioned. Don't Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE take care of this during the install?
Like I said though, I do think this article makes a great starting point for an "Idiot's Guide to Installing Debian." It would be even better with screenshots illustrating the different steps. It just needs to go further into initial configuration.
Personally I use "apt-cache search" to find what I want to install (maybe grep it aswell) and then "apt-get -u install" to install it. This way I can see what else is going to be installed before going ahead and I can use standard text tools to filter the list of packages apt-cache might spit out to find what I want. Sometimes I need "apt-cache show" just to check what I'm going to get. Once you have installed your debian system, all you ever really want to do is add particular programs so why bother with the "pain" of dselect or aptitude or gnome-apt or ..... just tell it to install what you want, make sure it isn't going to go insane to do it (like installing 100 other packages or replacing your mail transport or upgrade half your system to testing/unstable) if you don't want it to!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I admin a RH webserver, and I have to manually go in and tidy up rpm dependancy breaks all the time. Debian-unstable will usually fix these for you within 24 hours. If you're looking for stability comparable to RH, then use Debian-testing or Debian-unstable. If you want OpenBSD-like stability, then run -stable. (For the love of Gub, why doesn't Debian or OpenBSD have a way to check signatures on all of the official ports/packages?)
It's not even plug and play under Windows. If it's a mouse, then yeah. But if it's not, nine times out of ten you have to install a driver. Installing a driver is NOT plug and play.
Plug and play is taking your brand new USB device out of the box, plugging it in, and having it work instantly.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If they want less-than-ubergeeks to use it then they whole thing should be reworked.
Yes, and it is being reworked. Not so much because we think it needs to be "dumbed down" as because the existing system is fragile, and takes too much work to tune for each new release. Tweaking and banging on the old system has added months to each of the last couple of releases.
The new system (d-i, or debian-installer) is in heavy development, but wasn't ready in time for Woody.
Once you have installed your debian system, all you ever really want to do is add particular programs so why bother with the "pain" of dselect or aptitude or gnome-apt or ....[?]
Well, as a recent aptitude convert, I can give a partial answer to this. Aptitude keeps track of which packages have been installed purely as dependencies. Any "auto-installed" packages (marked with "A" in the display) will be automatically removed if you remove the package(s) that depend on them. (And you can set/unset the "auto-installed" flag manually if you want or need.)
Furthermore, you don't actually need to use the fancy aptitude interface -- you can treat it as (essentially) a replacement for apt-get, i.e. you can say, "aptitude install foo", and it'll install foo, plus its dependencies. However (and this is where it gets good), you can later say, "aptitude purge foo", and it will remove foo and its dependencies[1]. No "pain" involved for an experienced apt-get user, except learning to type "aptitude" where you used to type "apt-get".
Plus, unlike apt-get, aptitude will take notice of suggestions and recommendations. You can configure how it treats these. I find life much happier with aptitude treating "Recommends:" as a dependency and ignoring "Suggests:". This is much less annoying than apt-get's habit of simply ignoring everything except actual dependencies. (And, if you're the install-everything-just-for-luck type, you can have it auto-install all of the suggestions too.)
[1] except those dependencies in use by other things, of course.