| Author: | John M. Gabriele |
|---|---|
| Date: | May 2007 |
| Back to: | homepage |
I've been using Ubuntu on the desktop these days, but still use Debian GNU/Linux for servers. Some of the notes on this page are for desktop use, and others are actually starting to get out of date now that Etch is here. So, although it's in need of a little updating, I'm leaving it up for the time being.
In my experience, what's easiest and quickest is to download and burn a netinst CD. Boot from that, and at the boot prompt, type linux26.
When you get to where the partitioner starts up, you may have previously used a separate partition for your home director(y|ies). If so, then you might want to not reformat, say, your home partition, but instead just re-use it. At this stage, choose "Manually edit partition table". Scroll down to the various partitions on your system and hit Enter to make changes. The trick to keeping a previously-used partition - for example, "home" - is this: note the format of the partition, then, after choosing that partition that was previously home, choose "Use as:" and pick that same file format as before (by default it should already be correct). Then on the next screen, leave "Format the partition:" set to "no, keep existing data", but go to "mount point" and pick where you want this partition to be mounted (i.e., usually "/home").
During the install, do not make any selection when prompted as to what sort of packages should be installed. Don't even choose "manual package selection" -- choosing that would dump you right into dselect, which is not what you want.
As soon as you've got the base system installed, you might change your /etc/apt/sources.list from "stable" to "testing" (or "unstable"), then apt-get update and apt-get -u dist-upgrade.
You may also want to install the newest stable kernel for my architecture and reboot. After reboot, apt-get remove --purge the previous kernel.
Finally, here's my short list of essential packages to apt-get install immediately:
GUI-related packages:
Note: Sarge used x-window-system. Etch uses xorg. If installing from a Sarge image, I'll first get the base system in, then change my sources.list from stable to etch, apt-get update and dist-upgrade, then install xorg and friends.
Also consider:
The alsa packages you probably want are:
After installing those, as root, run alsaconf then alsamixer. In alsamixer, hit m to toggle muting for a given item.
Note, if tcd can't find your cd, and you've got more than one device that can play cd's, try starting it like tcd 0 or tcd 1. (As an aside, recall that the cd doesn't need to be mounted to play. The cd player program just reads the device directly.)
Also consider:
If you think you might be making any deb packages, have a close look at:
See my notes on simple printing.
Extras you might be interested in:
Create a ~/.Xresources file containing at least the following:
xterm*background: grey30 xterm*foreground: grey78 xterm*font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1 xterm*scrollBar: true xterm*rightScrollBar: true xterm*saveLines: 20000 xterm*cursorColor: DarkSeaGreen3 xterm*metaSendsEscape: true