Demcember, 1998
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The setup:
486DX with 8 Megs of RAM, Diamond Stealth Video Card, SVGA monitor, 530M and 120M Hard drives, no CD Rom, 1.44 floppy, NE2000 compatible ISA PNP ethernet card, hooked to a Win95 pentium box with an internet connection. Assuming you don’t have anything and no CD. Plan is to FTP the files I need.
Download the Files
Go to http://www.debian.org and get the following files:
(they aren't hyperlinked because you'll be getting them from the apropriate mirror)
resc1440.bin: This is the rescue disk image. It is used for initial setup, and also in emergencies when your system doesn't boot for some reason in the future. Therefore it is recommended you write the disk image to the floppy even if you are not using floppies for installation. 1440K.
drv1440.bin This disk image contains the kernel modules, or drivers, for all kinds of hardware that are not necessary for initial booting. You will be prompted to choose the drivers you need during the installation process. 1440K
base2_0.tgz 6.814M*
(*Actually I was going to install from a DOS partition but accidentally deleted all the available partions, so I ended up installing from floppy anyway. You won’t need it for this install.)
base14-1.bin...base14-5 These files contain the base system which will be installed on your Linux partition during the installation process. This is the bare minimum necessary for you to be able to install the rest of the packages. 1440K each, except #5, 1057K
root.bin This file contains an image of temporary filesystem that gets loaded into memory when you boot. This is used for installations from hard disk and from CD-ROM. 697K
rawrite2.exe This is a DOS utility to write a floppy disk image to a floppy. You should not copy images to the floppy, but instead use this utility to rawrite them. 18K
cfdisk.txt : instructions for using cfdisk, the partitioning software (if you need) 18K
basecont.txt : listing of contents of the base system.(if you need) 5K
About 10 megs worth of files in all. More come later.
To write the floppy disk image files to the floppy disks, use the command:
rawrite2 -f file -d drive
(You’ll be making them in this order: rescue, driver,base 1 through 5. You can get by with just one blank floppy if you want to sneakernet them between machines)
Starting with the rescue floppy:
call up a MSDOS window and rawrite2 -f resc1440.bin -d a:
Reboot the target machine with rescue disk (will take several minutes).
Following the on screen instructions is fairly straight forward:
The Configure Drivers screen (what windows calls device drivers linux calls modules, except for this screen) can be a little misleading, you might think the computer has auto configured and is finished already, waiting for you to hit return to exit) since it starts with the color bar on EXIT.
The screen:
EXIT
BLOCK
CDROM
FS
IPV4
MISC
NET and
SCSI (off the bottom of the screen)
When first going into a selection you’ll see:
“Please wait while modules are detected”
(Means it is checking to see if they have been put in the kernel already, not that it is detecting the hardware. You just gotta know what you got before hand.)
I stepped through all of them and found all the devices I had (a printer port, 2 serial ports and an ethernet card)
I found under
MISC
lp -printer port no paramets
serial - serial ports no parameters
NET
ne2000 (Needs to be detected. The autoprobe failed on “irq = 0” but on “io=0x300” worked).
Note: type “irq = 0” not “irq=0”.
ls --color=auto List files with colors..very handy
df -h ( h is for ‘human readable’ meaning list partitions in KB and MB). Also handy.
Q (or shift q, whatever) for how you back out of menus in deselct (although I got through it with Ctrl-c without probs) and:
v (little v) to expand the listing into a verbose mode.
Package handling is a little (lot) confusing at first, but very important.
dselect always starts up with a help screen, press space to get out.
The status of the packages is a cryptic row of characters on the left. Hit v for verbose to have it show the actual status of the package.
dselect will will install all packages that have the install flag set, even if they are installed already. This doesn’t hurt anything, but greatly slows the install process, since it tries to reinstall all installed software. You change the status of the packages with a
- for remove
= for hold in its current state, whatever that is
+ for install
If everything is running fine, run through dselect once. What you want to do is roughly the in the same order as the menu:
0. Access - choose the acces system to use. Choose mounted (your hard disk) at this point. Since you don’t have any distributions available, type none (you have to type it) for the location of all packages
1. Update - update the list of available packages, if possible. Should go out and find none. A package is a file with a .deb extension.
2. Select - what packages you want to install
3. Install - install packages
4. Config uninstalled packages
5. Remove packages
6. Exit
After running through dselect , it will run through the install scripts, “Ignoring installed packages”. This is because the default action for all the installed packages is install again and won’t change it. Go through and change them all to hold with your = key, and save yourself a lot of time.
On some packages a ‘dependency/conflict resolution’ screen will come up. This means the package has other components that it would like to have (or needs to have). Since this page is on installing a minimum system, we can’t FTP everything we want just yet. You can note what recommends or needs what else if you want, or else spacebar to see the warning and Q to back out.
A run through the dselect program steps again should be go pretty quick with everything installed or removed that should be. I ran this for a couple days with all those ‘install’ options set and every time I wanted to install something I ran through them all.
bsdutils
netbase
procps
arrow down to netbase and you’ll see
“netbase recommends netstd (>=3.00)
"netstd does not appear to be available"
"netbase suggests ccp”
This can trick you you in two ways, because:
‘recommends’ means netbase will not work without it.
‘suggests’ just means that its nice to have.
and
The first time around, trying to install the man pages I got
“groff recommends lib6c"
"groff suggests xli6g”
So I think, “Oh, if 6c is good 6g is the latest so I’ll get just that.” Nope. You need lib6c.
Start dselect
Go through [A]ccess method, pick mounted file system.
Pick ‘none’ for the Distribution Top Level (its looking for the whole shebang, which doesnt exist until you get a CD or a FTP connection).
Select /tmp as the directory for the *.deb packages:
Enter _main_binary_directory? /tmp
And none for everything else. (You don’t have a “Packages” file yet, more on that later)
[U]pdate list of available packages.
It runs through -- and doesn’t find it. For whatever reason, what works for me is to
[I]nstall selected packages, you’ll get ‘skipping deselected package Netstd...” and next time you run Select it will be in the list down by Available packages (not currently installed) and (by hitting v) you’ll see it’s marked for install.
[I]nstall
[Q]uit
Now if you take a look at inetd.conf (more /etc/inetd.conf) you’ll see a bunch of hair where there wasn’t hair before.
Windows 95 users: You don’t have to reboot every time you install something in Linux. This happens to be a really good time to reboot, however.
Windows95 users: While networking activates before the user logs in, in Linux root must log in from the console before networking becomes active.
From the Win95 box, you should be able to ping the Linux box. (“Start” “Run” “c:\windows\ping.exe” then type ‘ping 10.10.10.10’ or whatever the IP number you installed was.
FTP works too. Don’t forget you can’t FTP to the Linux box as root (access denied) but you can FTP in as the normal user you set up earlier and ‘su root’.
There are only three numbers you need to know:
THE IP ADDRESS (internet protocol address. In this case, we’ll go with 7.7.7.7 (yes, just make one up)).
THE BROADCAST ADDRESS (none of your business)
THE NETMASK (ditto)
This is actually not a problem since the broadcast address will always be 7.7.7.255 and the netmask will always be 255.255.255.0
Change the \windows\hosts file to read somthing like
7.7.7.7 win95machine_name
7.7.7.8 486dx
If both are configured for 7.7.7.7, someone has gotta change.
In Windows, “Start” “Settings” “Control Panel” “Network” click on the TCPIP binding for your ethernet card, and enter the numbers appropriate numbers. (Don't change the TCPIP binding on the dial up connector by mistake).
The name of your computer is on the "Identification" tab.
In linux, you do these things with ifconfig and uname.
It’s more complicated than that, but it will work for now.
It installs OK, but man-db needs package groff.
That insalls OK, but groff depends on libg++272.
Fortunately this doesn't go on forever, because, badda-boom, badda-bing, man pages are working after that.
I had an interesting time when I installed the 'Packages' file, it's a one meg file of everything available. Very handy, except it installs a huge list of programs that is a pain to scroll through. I tried every dselect and dpkg option to go back to my pre 'Packages' state, didn't succeed. Did succeed in naming all my installed stuff 'old, obsolete packages' however. Deleting relevant file lists etc just causes dselect and dpkg to error out. Think twice before you install it, am now sure if it can come out.