Talking Linux

Well I did a lot of work yesterday downstairs, just none of it was on the remodel. I spent probably half a day trying to get a Debian install on one of the computers. First I tried Libranet and that installation puked on the LILO install. For some reason it wouldn’t install it on the MBR, it told me that I would need to always boot off a flopy. Well that ain’t happening! So I tried a few other options for getting a true Debian install with many failures. Then I followed the advice from one the Penguinshell news letters from this past week. Using only floppies to the the machine to connect to the internet then install the rest from the web. All in all that was actually pretty easy worked quite well. I did hit a few bumps in the road however. Following the advice of Steve Waterman, I performed the base install then attempted to upgrade the kernel from 2.2.20 to 2.4.18. Everything seems to go fine for the kernel compile, but when I boot to it, it doesn’t find the ethernet adapter. I’m thinking it must be something in the config file that I missed or did wrong. My next hurdle was with X. Word of advice, before installing Debian, open up your macine and write down what every components manufacturor and model is. On all my lower end machines I use cheap ATI video cards, so thats what I figured was in there when I configured X. Well I was wrong. X wouldn’t load. So after opening the machine and checking the card, it turns out to be a Diamond Vipor V550. After searching the Debian mialing lists, found info to use the nvidia(nv) setting in the config. But in all this process I removed all the X packages and tried to reinstall them so I could be prompted do the xconfig again. Well that didn’t happen, so it was back off the Debian mailing lists. After a few searchs I found this wonderful command ‘dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86’ I ran that redid the config file using the nv option, exited and typed startx. Low and behold KDE came up!! By the end of the night I had a fully functional Debian install with KDE, apache, php, mysql, proftpd, and numerous other packages I like. I still don’t have the new kernel working, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out sooner or later. On a side note, the author of the HOWTO I followed mentions installing ee, as his text editor of choice, because he doesn’t like vi. Well neither do, but I found that nano is part of the base install and is what I have been using for years in RedHat. Thanks go out to Tony for putting out the PenguinShell and Chris Pirillo for giving the PenguinShell a home!