reminder: meeting today

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Joey Hess (joey@kitenet.net):

> Just a quick reminndder that the Cabal/BAD meeting is today, at 4 pm in the
> CoffeeNet in SF. Directions are at http://www.linuxmafia.com/cabal/
> 
> I hope to see you there!

Technically, we have the front room at 744 Harrison (between 3rd and
4th Streets) and can spill _over_ into the CoffeeNet in the same
building.  I'm in the CoffeeNet right now, frantically trying to get
organised for the meeting, and you-all are welcome at any time.  (You
needn't wait until 4 PM.)

My highly disorganised "Debian tips" notes for the meeting are as follows.  
I'm aiming to eventually have them in more-readable form at
http://linuxmafia.com/debian/

---snip---



Debian Installation Guide
ftp://www.debian.org/pub/debian/stable/disks-i386/current/install.html
20 pages

Debian FAQ  http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/  75 pages

Debian Users Guide (by Dale Sheetz)

http://www.debian.org/~elphick/ddp/manuals.html#devel is helpful

Debian Packaging Manual,
http://www.debian.org/~elphick/manuals.html/packaging-manual/

Debian Documentation Project, http://www.debian.org/~elphick/ddp/, which
  is generally a good place to find docs, some of which may not be in a
  finished state.

Debian 2.1 "Slink" has a fairly old XFree86 (v. 3.3.2).  (This software 
group comprises the video graphics engines for various video-card chipsets, 
and you may need to upgrade it to support recent video cards.)  Newest 
are available at http://master.debian.org/~vincent/xfree-3.3.3.1/
Make sure you read http://master.debian.org/~vincent/xfree-3.3.3.1/Packages 
to determine which packages to upgrade (and not miss any important ones).

Debian's installer puts you in cfdisk.  If you prefer the traditional
Linux fdisk, exit cfdisk and switch to a different virtual terminal
(Ctrl-Alt-F2), then use fdisk there, then switch virtual terminals 
back (Ctrl-Alt-F1).  (You should exit cfdisk because it would otherwise
render fdisk unable to write to the disk device.)

The installer may prompt you for an expansion card's (e.g., an ethernet
card's) hardware resources, such as I/O base address and IRQ.  Try
omitting that data, which induces a fairly reliable autoprobe process,
to find the correct values.



Surviving "dselect":  dselect is a software package-selection and 
configuration tool, liked by a few, detested by many, and due to be
replaced soon.  During Debian installation, you will briefly encounter
it but need not ever use it thereafter, post-installation.  (Better
tools are available, e.g., apt-get, dpkg.)

Suggestion:  Do not attempt to adjust package selection in any way
inside dselect, during your initial installation.  Doing so can prolong
your installation time by many hours, as you wrestle with dselect.
One avoids this pitfall by selecting, on an installer screen just prior
to entering dselect, a "profile" (a predefined set of packages to install, 
for a machine role such a network server, scientific workstation, etc.).
You can recognise that installer screen by the following (rather 
confusing) text on it:

    Now you may choose one of several selections of packages to
    be installed.  If you prefer to select one by one which packages
    to install on the system you may skip this step, else you may
    skip the 'Select' step later when I run the 'dselect' program.

Let's translate that into English:

It's saying you may choose either of two ways to specify packages to
be installed.

(1) You might elect to pick a "profile".  After doing so, you will be 
run through a program called 'dselect' whose main menu consists of 
about six numbered steps.  Ignore step number 3, 'Select', since having
already specified a profile makes that step redundant.

  or...

(2) You might prefer _not_ to use a "profile", in order to pick and
choose individual packages during initial installation.  In that case, 
you'll definitely want to perform all of the dselect program's numbered 
steps, including step number 3, 'Select'.

You are strongly advised to go with the first option during initial
installation:  Do not attempt to tweak dselect's package selection to
do a "kitchen sink" installation, or for any other reason.  People who
do that end up dealing with dependency issues in dselect for hours.
You Have Been Warned.

(Among many faults, dselect's 'Select' step presents you with a 
non-collapsible scrolling list of 2500+ packages.  Horrors.)

While you are in dselect, as the program is installing your packages, it
will scroll past your eyes quite a lot of configuration information,
sometimes prompting you for setup choices.  (Unlike some other
distributions, Debian has you make those choices during package
installation rather than providing generic values for them.)  You are
strongly advised to take notes on paper and take your time, since some
of the information displayed is valuable, and to my knowledge is not
logged.  (The latter fact is the single biggest reason I think dselect
is Evil and Must Die, by the way.)

In particular, don't think of dselect as a general system-administration 
and setup tool (like SuSE's "yast").  It isn't one.  Other utilities 
perform those functions:  
   -- Use xf86config or XF86Setup (those names are case-sensitive) to 
      configure the X Window System after installing needed X packages.
   -- Use Wvdial or ppp-config to configure Internet dial-up networking.
   -- Use apt-get and dpkg to install/remove/configure Debian packages.



pine/pico:

Debian does not by default install "non-free" packages -- those under
restrictive software licences (although many are provided and available
for installation).  If you are a user of the "pine" e-mail client or
the "pico" text editor that pine provides, please be aware that pine
is non-free and therefore is not a default installation item.  

The U. of Washington's licence forbids distribution of pine/pico in 
binary form.  This restriction is routinely violated by many GNU/Linux 
distributions, but not by Debian.  You can thus install pine and pico
(in Debian) by installing the pine source-code package and then
compiling the programs.


Need to investigate the following comment from Chris Waters:
> Debian 2.0 has a tool that injects a source package into CVS (with
> vendor branch separate from packaged branch), and lets you check out
> source *and* binary packages.  Problem solved. [...]
> I was suggesting that you could use CVS to install patches and
> new releases without losing the packaging information, so the
> package manager wouldn't *get* confused.


Need to supply some comment about /etc/alternatives

Post-installation adjustments:

-- Ensure that /dev/null has writable permissions,
   e.g., "chmod 666 /dev/null".  My Debian 2.0 installation set the
   permissions, in error, to 660.

-- Consider manually creating symlinks cdrom, floppy, and mouse in the /dev
   directory.

-- Consider cleaning up the format of /etc/fstab in a text editor, and
   adding entries for your CD-ROM and floppy devices, e.g.:

     #<filesys> <mount pnt> <type> <options>               <dump><pass>
     /dev/sda1  /           ext2   defaults,errors=remount-ro 0   1
     /dev/sda2  none        swap   sw                         0   0
     /dev/fd0   /mnt/floppy ext2   noauto                     0   0
     /dev/scd0  /mnt/cdrom  iso9660 noauto,ro                 0   0
     proc       /proc       proc   defaults                   0   0

Post-installation addition/removal of software packages.
-- dpkg: very decent command-line package installer/uninstaller
-- The wonder that is apt-get:
     -- automatically retrieves additional packages as needed to
        satisfy dependencies
     -- can be used to systematically track either a named Debian
        version (e.g., potato, slink, hamm, bo) or the symlinks 
        "stable" and "unstable".  Sysadmin can either run apt-get 
        manually or as a cron job.

Basic update of the already-installed packages:

    apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

To switch to tracking the "unstable" Debian branch:

-- add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
   deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
-- Re-run "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade".  You are now upgraded
   to the "unstable" branch.

After installing packages, run
   apt-get clean
to clear out /var/cache/apt (?) where .deb packages otherwise
accumulate.


apt-get update && apt-get build-upgrade
will update your system and then recompile all installed software.

Tweak /etc/apt/build-options  (?) to set compiler flags, etc.