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[LUG] A Debian Install



It's that time of year again...

Just about every year it seems, I take a look at Debian to see if I like 
it.  Usually, after installation and a lot of frustration with setting 
things up I get bored and put in an order for the latest SUSE.  This year 
it was different, but then again, this year I have broadband!

This is, or started out as, notes to myself, but then I decided to post 
them to the list in the hope that they may be of some use or interest to 
others.  Debian veterans can probably stop reading now!

I was interested in the new Debian installer and downloaded the 
"businesscard" version and burnt it to cd.  With only 30mb this little 
thing can boot from cd and start installation of the system from an ftp 
server while still loaded in ram disk.  I selected a spare partition on my 
HD and let it run.  It picked up the network settings by DHCP from my 
Smoothwall box.  I did not have to remember which ftp site to choose for 
download as it had them all listed by country and offered me up the uk 
mirrors first - since I had already set that as my keyboard - a nice touch 
I thought.  So I soon had it downloading from the blueyonder debian mirror 
(yes I am one of their customers).  Unfortunately, somewhere along the 
line the thing stopped with a dependency problem and I was unable to work 
out how to get it going again in the right place, a situation complicated 
by the fact that I wanted to omit the grub/lilo  installation phase and 
instead configure booting from the grub installation on my SUSE partition.

So I gave up without bothering too much more and put in the cd of the 
standard debian installer (100mb image).  Things went smoothly this time 
and after downloading everything it needed I was left with a standard 
console only installation of Debian Testing.  For those who don't know, 
Debian exists in 3 flavours, Stable (very), Testing (if it works OK it 
goes into Stable) and Unstable (all the latest stuff).

So now to the famed "apt-get install" command.  I am not a veteran command 
line hacker and prefer the comfort of a GUI. My weapon of choice in this 
regard is KDE so "apt-get install kde" have a cup of tea and watch some TV 
and it's done.  Debian veterans may have spotted the mistake already.  
This got KDE ok but not all of the X windows system needed for it to work.  
Looking around the package list with Aptitude (Aptitude appears to be a 
successor to the awful dselect and not much better in my view!) I spotted 
the "x-window-system" package.  Installing that and making a few good 
configuration guesses I was up and running with a GUI.  The only thing I 
needed to do was to raid XF86config from my SUSE installation for the 
Horizontal and Vertical refresh values for the monitor. 

So far so good.  Now - time to get (over)ambitious and upgrade the whole 
shooting match to "unstable"!   Edited /etc/apt/sources.list and changed 
each occurrence of "testing" to "unstable" then ran "apt-get update" 
followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade".  More tea and TV (quite a lot) and it 
did the stuff.  Firing up X was a suprise though as it gave me the default 
primitive windowmanager (twm?)  which at least allowed me to start up 
Konquerer and confirm the upgrade had worked - Debian unstable has kde 3.2 
which was the whole reason for trying it.  Hacking around 
in /etc/alternatives gave me a clue as to what was happening but I'm 
afraid I short-circuited the debian alternatives system and 
relinked /etc/alternatives/x-window-manager to /usr/bin/startkde - which 
worked.

My preferred desktop has 2 15inch monitors working side by side at 
1024x768.  So far, in setting up Debian I had only managed a single 
monitor setup.  I don't know it there are any utilities which will 
reliably set up this system, if there are I haven't found them, with my 
(now quite old) matrox card I have only been able to set this up by hand.  
More cutting and pasting from XF86Config from the SUSE installation and 
copying across an extra driver 
(/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/mga_hal_drv.o) and this was sorted.

Must have more fonts...  Well, to be honest there really is not much reason 
for this because Linux now has access to a couple of nice truetype fonts, 
but then again, I do some web development and it is useful if your browser 
is displaying the same font as most other peoples 
(font-family: "Trebuchet MS", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;), etc so how to 
get the ms fonts.  The last time I tried to install Debian, I tripped up 
on this badly and ended up making a meal of it when I don't think it was 
quite necessary.  Googling on it gave me the hint - "apt-get install 
msttcorefonts"  which downloaded and installed the fonts which were 
instantly available to KDE.  Impressed! this was easier than SUSE - once 
you have found out what to do.

Checking the image scanner - connected via usb - with Kooka (a kde app) it 
seems to just work, so no problems there, the printer however was a 
different matter.  I have a cheapo HP deskjet (930c) connected by USB and 
it was not set up or available at all.  CUPS did not appear to be 
installed or at least was not running (http://localhost:631/ gave 
nothing).  Linux printing systems are getting far to complex for my little 
brain to understand and I was quite apprehensive about getting it working 
without a major documentation reading festival.  Eventually, after a lot 
of searching, I found out that if I wanted to install CUPS I needed to 
"apt-get install cupsys" (obvious not).  After doing that I tried 
localhost:631 again and got a result - cups was running - after giving the 
root password I was able to successfully setup my printer via the cups web 
interface. 

After all that there was only one thing to do - go to the pub! There are 
still plenty of things to sort out with this installation but I'm getting 
the impression that most of them will be solvable.  For example, whilst 
writing this message - with kmail - I wanted to spellcheck it but was told 
that ispell was not available.  "apt-get ispell" told me that it was going 
to install iamerican as well.  So I cancelled it and tried "apt-get 
ibritish"  which - of course- depended on ispell so I got what I needed.  
The only major item to sort out now is the cdburner, but having had 
success on everything else I am quite hopeful.

The Debian developers seem to have been putting a lot of time into making 
many aspects of the installation easier, although finding out what you 
need to do is sometimes harder than it should be.  I'm very impressed with 
this system, but, I suspect that having a permanent reliable internet 
connection has a lot to do with it.  This perhaps is not a system for the 
beginner but then it does not make the demands  that previous incarnations 
of this distro might have done.

Tony
2004/04/04

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