[SWLUG] First real post

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 29/02/2004 am 14:52, ysgrifennodd Foeh Mannay:
> On 02/29/04 14:00:43, Daniel T. Morgan wrote:
> >Hey all,
> 
> Hi
> 
> >I'm presuming that I just need to add the lines:
> >
> >deb http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main
> >deb-src http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing
> >main
> >
> >And then running apt-get update (correct me if I'm wrong), and away  
> >to go.
> 
> I've personally run into problems doing this in the past - I think I  
> managed to have two unstable branches listed and one stable, which  
> kicked up a hell of a row about dependancies, so I now have just the  
> unstable ones in there. I think you can comment the stable ones out if  
> you're worried.
> 
> When I had both in there I asked it to install something which updated  
> a library that KDE depended on, so it cheerfully uninstalled KDE and  
> all its apps, updated the library then noticed there were unmet  
> dependancies (nice time to check) and refused to reinstall anything. So  
> I try to keep my sources list as clean as possible nowadays.

I think support in APT for having more than one version of Debian in
your sources.list has improved since Woody was released. I think the
pinning support is better, the conflict resolution is better, and you're
less likely to encounter the "E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room" error.

This means that if you want to use sarge (testing) or sid (unstable)
with woody, it's probably a good idea to:

 1) make a sources.list containing only sid sources
 2) run "apt-get install apt", to install the latest APT
 3) continue according to the APT documentation of your choice

With regards to step three, candidates for reading material include

 - Apt-Pining for Beginners <http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html>
 - APT HOWTO Chapter 3 <http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-apt-get.en.html#s-default-version>

Both of these explain the use of multiple Debian versions quite well.
There are other documents around which can be found with a little
searching.

> >Now presuming I'm correct in this do I need to uninstall the older
> >version first, as I have no intentions of running both versions side  
> >by side.

> Someone may correct me but I think if you installed the original  
> version with apt-get then it will do all the cleaning up for you when  
> you tell it to install the new version.

Dpkg will not install two packages if a conflict is declared between
them. I think perhaps apache and apache2 are parallell-instalable, but
if you don't want to keep Apache 1 around, an "apt-get remove apache"
should suffice.

> >b0c:/var/www/admin# iptables -L
> >modprobe: Can't locate module ip_tables
> >iptables v1.2.6a: can't initialize iptables table `filter': iptables
> >who?
> >(do you need to insmod?)
> >Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.
> >b0c:/var/www/admin#
> 
> I had the same thing when I first installed debian. Not sure why it  
> didn't come with the support ready to rock, but hey...

I thought stock Debian kernels had iptables support enabled. Perhaps I'm
wrong.

> I can't remember where I found the howto - possibly tldp.org - though I  
> remember being talked through it on the #swlug channel on irc.freenode. 
> net the one time as I was trying to do something obscure with the last  
> rebuild. The instructions I got then (thanks dwd & Kneecaps) were  
> essentially along the lines of untarring the kernel source, cd-ing to  
> the directory, then running:
> 
> make xconfig [select everything you need here]
> make dep && make bzlilo modules
> make install modules_install
> lilo
> reboot

If you're using Debian, there's a much more preferable way of doing
things: the kernel-package package. Building a kernel consits of, in the
kernel source directory, assuming you've done the configuration stage,
something along the lines of

$ make-kpkg clean
$ make-kpkg --rootcmd fakeroot kernel_image

This will generate a file with a name such as
kernel-image-2.6.3-mm4_1.0_i386.deb in the parent directory. You then
install this kernel image like a normal Debian package and your kernel
is installed. You can even configure it to set up your bootloader (be it
LILO or GRUB or whatever) with some tweaking of /etc/kernel-img.conf.

Generated packages include the proper System.map-VERSION and
config-VERSION files in /boot.

There are other things it can do: creating symbolic links, automatically
patching the kernel, and compiling bits of the kernel external to the
main tree. I believe ALSA for 2.4 is supported in this way.
kernel-package confusingly refers to external trees as "modules".

I've found that using kernel-package makes installing and uninstalling
custom kernels a lot simpler.

That said, I think that the stock Debian kernel images are generally
very well thought out and that most users usually don't need to compile
their own kernel. (My excuse is that I want a 2.6 kernel and that I have
hardware not supported by the standard kernel.)

-- 
Dafydd