This is the first in a series of documents about the experiences of And this time, I intend to Do It Right<\/strong> and also to This first document looks at the installation and the immediate After making the decision to re-install the operating system, I did three Installation was very smooth; all hardware was automatically detected. There Debian Package Repositories<\/i><\/p>\n The installation used the three CDs I downloaded, but I now wanted to make sure Note that this includes entries for both the binaries and also the source, nVidia Graphics Card<\/i><\/p>\n The base system included a stock 2.4.27 kernel optimised for 386 systems, so When installing the nVidia module, one or two minor edits to The first option is probably the simplest, although the second is probably Similar group membership tricks are required to permit access to the CDROM, Extras<\/i><\/p>\n It seems that the Macromedia Flash<\/a> Next I had to edit the Exim4 setup in order to send all My own project, colordiff<\/a>, is now part and have it downloaded and installed automatically.<\/p>\n I also installed The installation process setup my networking by installing a DHCP client to Future<\/i><\/p>\n Before I trashed my old setup, I was running a 2.6.x series kernel and, since Rationale This is the first in a series of documents about the experiences of installing a new Debian workstation system. As a result of confusing my old installation by selecting a strange mixture of Debian\/Testing and Debian\/Unstable sources, I decided to re-install. And this time, I intend to Do It Right and also to Do… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ninstalling a new Debian<\/a> workstation system.
\nAs a result of confusing my old installation by selecting a strange mixture of
\nDebian\/Testing and Debian\/Unstable sources, I decided to re-install.<\/p>\n
\nDo It The Debian Way<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\npost-installation configuration.<\/p>\nInstallation<\/h4>\n
\nthings:<\/p>\n\n
\/home<\/code> partition and most of the existing
\n\/etc<\/code>, for
\nconfiguration files;<\/li>\n
\n2004-10-12 snapshot).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\nare some nice extra features available in the new installer. I suspect that, had
\nI been installing completely from scratch it would have been even easier. I
\nhad to take care, however, because I had pre-existing disk partitions, some of
\nwhich I wanted to keep. A nice feature of the partitioning tool during
\ninstallation was the option to set some basic filesystem parameters. For
\nexample, I use leafnode<\/a> to allow
\nfast, offline reading of newsgroups. Since this results in a high turnover of a
\nlarge number of small files, I put the \/var\/spool<\/code> filesystem on its own
\npartition. The installer actually gave a ‘news’ option for the partition
\nfilesystem settings, optimized for small files.<\/p>\nPost-installation tweaking and customisation<\/h4>\n
\nthat I had access to the full Debian archives. I changed
\n\/etc\/apt\/sources.list<\/code> to include the following:<\/p>\n\r\n deb ...\/debian\/ sarge main non-free contrib\r\n deb-src ...\/debian\/ sarge main non-free contrib\r\n deb ...\/debian-non-US\/ sarge\/non-US main non-free contrib\r\n deb-src ...\/debian-non-US\/ sarge\/non-US main non-free contrib\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nsince I know that there are some packages I’ll want to rebuild using different
\noptions, for which the source code will be required.<\/p>\n
\nI upgraded to the 686-optimised version. At the same time, I downloaded the
\nbinary module for my nVidia graphics card. In the past, I’ve always rolled my
\nown kernel (as I will do shortly with this installation too), but to get up and
\nrunning quickly, using a binary nVidia module matching the stock kernel is a
\nhelpful option.<\/p>\n
\n\/etc\/X11\/XF86Config-4<\/code> are required, in particular to get the OpenGL
\nside of things working properly. The GLX README in the Debian documentation
\ntells you to remove GLcore<\/code> and dri<\/code> support. It should
\nbe possible to have the above changes happen automatically, or be triggered as a
\nresult of doing a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86<\/code>, but I didn’t
\ntry that. The
\nnVidia card using the device file \/dev\/nvidiactl<\/code> which, by default,
\ncan only be accessed by user root and members of the group ‘video’. So, there
\nare three options here:<\/p>\n\n
chmod 666<\/code> to allow all users access;<\/li>\nchown root.everyone
\n\/dev\/nvidiactl<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\nconsidered more correct and is the one I used. The third option occurred to me
\nwhile I was doing the setup, although I didn’t use it.<\/p>\n
\nfloppy and sound system.<\/p>\n
\nplugin (for web browsers) depends on the package gsfonts-x11<\/code>, which
\nwasn’t installed by default and wasn’t picked up as a dependency by
\napt-get<\/code> when installing the package
\nflashplugin-nonfree<\/code> – in fact, it’s listed as a ‘recommended’
\npackage, not a dependency. The symptoms were that Flash had not been installed,
\nwhen this was clearly the case.<\/p>\n
\noutgoing mail via authenticated SMTP – this was fairly straightforward, since
\nthe stock configuration file is very well commented.<\/p>\n
\nof Debian and so it was very nice to be able to simply type:<\/p>\n\r\n apt-get install colordiff\r\n<\/pre>\n
ntpdate<\/code> to keep the clock on my system properly
\nsynchronized with an accurate time source.<\/p>\n
\npick up an IP address automatically. This worked because I have a DHCP server
\non my network. However, my workstation normally boots up much faster than all
\nthe other systems, so when it tries to bring up networking, the system running
\nthe DHCP server hasn’t finished booting up yet. So, I decided to hardwire the
\nIP configuration on my system. I knew I could do this by editing various files
\nsuch as \/etc\/network\/interfaces<\/code>, \/etc\/resolv.conf<\/code> and
\nso on, but wanted to do this the Right Way. I knew I needed to
\ndpkg-reconfigure<\/code> a package, but it wasn’t clear which one. A quick visit to the #debian IRC
\nchannel on freenode<\/a> got the answer,
\nappropriately enough from diffrentcolours<\/a>.
\nThe answer is to install and configure the package etherconf<\/code> which
\nasks a couple of questions about the (static) IP configuration and writes out
\nall the appropriate configuration files.<\/p>\n
\ngeneral system performance seemed very good under that setup, I plan to migrate
\nto a 2.6 kernel as soon as possible. I have downloaded the Debian source
\npackage for 2.6.8 and will build this together with the corresponding nVidia
\ngraphics module. I have a configuration file from my old 2.6.6 kernel as a good
\nstarting point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"