[SWLUG] Installing debian

[Robert McQueen]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 01:52:00PM -0000, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Strange - I'm also trying to get debian installed at the moment.
> 
> I downloaded the netinst CD image for debian-testing, and booted it under
> Vmware.  Didn't get very far - the image didn't seem to recognise any of my
> Vmware hard disks or Cdroms, and had a very small selection of networking
> modules, so I couldn't get networking installed either.
> 
> Bit of a shock!
> 
> I couldn't find any docs about the netinst CD image on debian.org, and
> Google pretty much turned up a blank.  Can anyone point me at something I've
> missed?
> 
> Ta,
> Stu

A few points come to mind. The first two are about testing... one is
that I would strongly recommend against anyone using testing at the
moment, because glibc breakage on m68k and/or sunrpc licensing problems
in unstable is keeping *everything* out of testing. That means no
security updates and no bugfixes, and no GNOME2, and basically very
little advantages over stable. Stick with stable and you get security
updates, or just go with unstable and get the updated packages with all
the new features, new bugs, but security fixes.

The second is that if your net install CD is for testing, then it may
well be using the new very very rough debian-installer system, which is
all set to totally revolutionise debian installation, but really isn't
there yet. Lots of built-in assumptions and weirdness, and generally I'd
be unsurprised if it failed to work on lots of hardware^W"hardware".

If it's some kind of boot-floppies (the old install system, whether
you're using floppies or not =) based system, as stable uses, then there
are some kernel issues to consider. One is that lots of common drivers
are included in the stock kernels, esp PCI stuff that can definitely
autodetect properly, so your network card may have already been detected
at boot, hence no module. To check try doing nothing in the 'Configure
OS and Modules' stage, and see if 'Configure Network' is the next
suggestion, or go to Alt+F2 and cat /proc/net/dev.

The other kernel consideration is that boot-floppies sets are generated
with several "flavours" of kernel. bf24 (ask for it by name at the
boot prompt on the first woody CD, which uses ISOlinux =) is a fairly
sane 2.4 kernel setup with a great deal of useful stuff built in
and as modules. Unless you have an overwhelming desire for amazing
proven rock-solid stability, installing with bf24 is a good idea if you
want a fighting chance of your hardware being supported.

The rest of them are 2.2 based, with the normal set containing a large
number of odd IDE/SCSI adapters, and almost all other drivers built on
several disk-fulls of modules, then there is an idepci set patched with
some crazy IDE stuff, for more hardware support, and also there is a
compact set which has less odd old IDE/SCSI drivers, and less modules,
resulting in less disk shuffling if you have the misfortune to be doing
that.

The final point is that woody has no official netinst CDs. I tried to
prod the debian-cd guy into adding the patch to his setup and making
some official up to date signed ones, but this didn't happen. As far as
I can tell, the only up to date stable netinst CDs, and certainly the
ones I use all the time, are the XFS net install CDs at:
 http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/
The without basedebs one works if you have an ethernet connection, but
if you need to dial up or use PPPoE, you need the one with basedebs,
because these can only be set up after you've installed the base system
and rebooted.

These also have the advantage of using a really cool journaling
filesystem which is hella fast compared to ext2, and has also existed
for about twice the time as ext2 has. It's just new to Linux. :D
You can still choose reiserfs or ext2/ext3 with these install CDs, as
you can with the bf24 image.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Rob