[H-GEN] Clueless question.

Tue Jun 30 05:11:41 EDT 1998

On Tue, Jun 30, 1998 at 12:39:11PM +1000, Rob Kearey wrote:
> Can debian 2.0 install over ftp? I've just had a look at the install
> readme, and the installation process looks pretty clunky.

The new install process is basically:

	1. Boot the Debian rescue disk
	2. Install the base system
	3. Install the rest of the system

You can do (1.) by either dd'ing the rescue disk to a flopping and rebooting,
or running loadlin from DOS [0].

Step (2.) involved unpacking the ~7MB (?) base system onto your computer,
and configuring your network and such. This is where you get asked for
your IP address, or configure PPP, where you set your timezone and the
rest of that stuff. The files can come either from floppy, NFS or from
your hard drive.  I'm pretty sure ftp isn't an option for this bit.

Once you've done that, you should be able to reboot into an absolutely
minimal Debian system. At this point you'll be asked a few final things,
and told to set a root password, and then thrown into dselect.

You're now up to step (3.), which you can do however you damn please.
You've got a fully fledged Debian box at this point, you're just missing
most of the interesting tools. The recommended way of continuing is to
go into dselect, tell it how you want to [A]ccess the archive [1], tell it
to [U]pdate itself on what's available, then skip the [S]elect step --
a pretty complete standard setup is selected by default [2]; and tell it
to [I]nstall.

It'll then download anything you need, and install it.

This will take a while, and you can't even leave it alone all the time,
as it'll ask questions all the way through. It's pretty crappy that you
have to twiddle your thumbs about it, I know. [3]

After that, you're done. You might like to roam through /etc customizing
various bits and pieces; or you might like to go back into dselect and
choose some extra packages (read the help, be careful what keys you press
and listen to dselect's advice if it complains about missing dependencies
or conflicts -- it *usually* makes a pretty good guess at what you want).

Do install the "bug" package; that way you can say "bug command"
to report a bug with the command "command", or "bug package" to
report a bug with the package "package". The Bug Tracking System
at http://www.debian.org/Bugs/ is the canonical way of suggesting
improvements or pointing out problems. It's usually worth checking that the
bug hasn't already been reported before running bug, too.

"anacron" is also worthwhile if you don't leave your computer on 24/7 --
it'll run any missed cronjobs at bootup. Ummm. Getting pine working can
be a problem, since Debian (well, anyone) isn't allowed to distribute
modified binaries of it -- so there are pine-src and pine-diff debs that
you have to install and compile yourself first. [4]

What else? smail is the default MTA, rather than sendmail, qmail, or exim.
I use exim, and think it's quite nifty. If you want to use qmail, you need
to download qmail-src and compile it yourself, as per pine, because it's
got a lame license too.

You can install all four versions of emacs at once if you like
(emacs-19, emacs-20, xemacs-19 and xemacs-20), there's no conflicts
amongst them as you might have expected. vim, nvi and someother vi clone
are available for vi people. There's a distributed-net client called,
well, distributed-net. There's a personal proxy too [5]. Both configure
themselves nicely, and get automatically started at startup.

Hmmm. What else?

Oh, if you want X, you need xbase, xserver-{something appropriate}
and you probably also want xserver-vga16. The latter of which contains
a moderately nifty configuration utility. It'll be moved somewhere more
sensible in the next release or so, apparently, but didn't make it into
this one.

If you run "update-menus" as a user, most windowmanagers will use the
data it generates to automagically supply a decent right-click menu. You
can add your own stuff in a way that update-menus won't clobber too, but
I've no idea how. RTFM.

If you're new to Debian, be aware that it's a pretty safe bet that any
given package has a moderate amount of docs in /usr/doc/packagename;
and almost every configuration file is in /etc rather than scattered
through /usr or /var or anywhere silly. I presume RedHat does the same,
but I'm fairly sure Slackware was a little more lax when I last used it.

Oh! Compiling your kernel is generally best done slightly different
with Debian too. [6] Basically, rather than just doing "make zImage;
make modules; make modules_install" and putting the zImage somewhere
appropriate and running lilo by hand (or whatever *you* do), the
Debian Way, is to use make-kpkg from the "kernel-package" .deb, and
let it make a kernel-image.deb for you, which you then install. This
has the benefits that you don't have to do particularly much by
hand, and that you can be sure that the modules are kept up to date, 
you can have different versions of the kernel and modules kept nicely
in sync and, from what I'm told, you can even have two kernels with
the same version and different modules with very little trickery to
get right. [7] 

Simple really. :P

Cheers,
aj

[0] C:\> LOADLIN LINUX root=/dev/ram initrd=RESC.BIN
    or something similar, iirc. grep for loadlin in the install.txt file.

[1] I personally recommend Apt. It's still somewhat experimental, and thus
    not available by default. It ensures packages are installed in the right
    order first time much better than any of the others, it supports http
    and ftp access (http is recommended for speed), supports the http_proxy
    environment variable, and has a nice command-line utility "apt-get", that
    lets you do things like:
	# apt-get update           # update apt's idea about what deb's 
                                     are available for download

	# apt-get dist-upgrade     # update all packages to the latest
                                     versions from the ftp site.

        # apt-get install netris   # install netris, and anything it might
                                     need to run

    If you want to get apt to run, grab apt_something_i386.deb from
    ftp.questnet.net.au/pub/debian/project/experimental/ .

    Yes, the experimental is there for a reason. It does work for me,
    however.

    The correct entires for apt's source.list for questnet are:

deb http://ftp.questnet.net.au/debian frozen main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.questnet.net.au/debian-non-US stable/binary-i386/
deb http://ftp.questnet.net.au/debian-non-US unstable/binary-i386/

    You'll be asked for these when you tell dselect to use apt as its
    [A]ccess method. I'm not sure in what format. The first line says
    "use the frozen release, in particular the /main/ /contrib/ and
    /non-free/ componenents thereof", the latter two say "use the
    stable and unstable bits from the crypto area". Those will get
    changed at some point to match the first line more nicely.

    Apt is the nominated successor to dselect. It's half finished, as 
    you can tell -- it doesn't replace all of dselect yet, just the
    engine part. A GUI is half-written, but the two parts haven't been
    hooked up yet. http://www.debian.org/~jgg/ has screenshots, and
    other stuff about Apt (nee Deity).

[2] I think. You're probably better of pressing enter on [S]elect, space
    to skip the help, then enter to say "yes, that's fine" to whatever it
    chooses for you. The first time in dselect is always the worst, btw.

[3] Personally, I rather twiddle my thumbs then and have everything that's
    installed properly setup, rather than having dodgy defaults to forget
    about. YMMV. Others' do. People are working on moving all the questions
    together, but I don't know how quickly. 

[4] One word: mutt. :)

[5] Mine. :)

[6] Bet you didn't see *that* one coming.

[7] Different configuration options to the kernel compile can make some
    modules have nothing to link against when loaded, which can stuff
    things up.

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.

      ``It's not a vision, or a fear. It's just a thought.''
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