[Wolves] Debian Installation for first time newbie

sparkes sparkes at phreaker.net
Sat Apr 3 17:31:17 BST 2004


On Sat, 2004-04-03 at 16:17, Tim Humpherson wrote:

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<snip> incredimail made it difficult to reply to this inline

hi Tim
welcome to the lug and to the wonderful world of debian linux.

What you need to do is run 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86' if you
want to reconfigure your X setup.  The problem you are getting is
because you are installing debian stable.

In many linux distros the lastest stable release isn't all that stable
but has the lastest software packages as default.  Debian is very
different.  Stable is, well, stable.  This means that some of the
packages you require might not be available.

One of the things not available in debian 3 is a newer Xfree86 and this
is where your problems are.

There are two possible solutions to this problem and they both involve
upgrading to debian unstable (skipping the middle ground debian testing)
via either your current debian install or a gnoppix (morphix whatever)
live cd.

You need to edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list so that the stable
references are replaced with unstable.  As an example here is my laptop
that I only installed this time yesterday (needs latest X version)

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib
non-free

Note that the uk mirror was having a couple of problems yesterday so
these are the american and generic none-us servers.  If you are on
blueyonder you might get better results from their servers. you will
currently have the cd's listed in this file but can safely either leave
them (packages will be obsoleted unless they are the same as on the
server) or comment them out by starting the line with a #

You then need to run a couple of commands.  First to refresh your
sources list do.
'apt-get update'
This grabs all the package info from the servers and adds it to your
local database.  Then the big upgrade (I presume that as you downloaded
6 cd's worth you have a decent connection ;-) )
'apt-get dist-upgrade'
This will only download the packages you require.  This will take a
while and towards the end (or what you think is the end) debconf will
start asking you some questions about your install.  It will ask if you
want to upgrade libc and warn you this could be a bad thing, don't worry
it's exactly what you want.  Unless you have already set up things like
email etc when it asks you if you want the maintainers new config file,
take it, this is normally only asked when a new file format is used.

Then sit back and leave debian to fix everything up for you.

Using knoppix is exactly the same you install on the disk and then alter
the source.list so it upgrades to debian.

Don't be afraid to ask any more questions as you are jumping into linux
feet first with debian.

sparkes




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