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Nori's mini-HOWTO:
Debian Woody on the Dell Inspiron 8000
Nori Heikkinen
August 13, 2003
Rationale
All my previous installs of Debian have been really easy, but then again they've
all been on PC desktops. The deal has been:
1. Download the rst ISO image onto CD
2. Stick the CD in your drive
3. (Make sure you have the BIOS set to boot o the CD before the hard
drive)
4. Follow instructions, generally hitting 'okay' for the next half hour
5. Ignore tasksel by and large
6. Ignore most of the dsele
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256M RAM ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M4 AGP ESS Technology ES1983S Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10) a Dell Logitech scrolly-wheel infrared mouse, model M-UR69 I was working o a Debian Woody image with the stock kernel 2.2.20-idepci, downloaded from the Rutgers mirror here: ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/debian-cd/images/i386/debian-30r1-i386-binary-1.iso This image had a corrupt library (libpcap0 0.6.2-2 i386.deb), which pre- vented me from using the CD as my primary installa
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linux video=vga16:off (The kernel image, followed by the boot parameters.) You can now boot up okay, but you'll need to be wary of this when you're glibly `ENTER'ing through menus later in the install | when you're asked if you want to append anything to the kernel image for the boot loader, you need to type that line (video=vga16:off) again. If you don't, the screen will get split again. You can x a split screen if you already have an installed system by editing your/etc/lilo.conf. In yourlinu
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if the display is not perfect | it might not crash if it's not, but if it does, you don't want to have to not only wait for it to check all its inodes (if you haven't yet tune2fs'd it to ext3 | see Section 7.1), but perhaps screw up in the process of so many crashes. If that's perfect, great! If not, read on . . . 1.2.2 Horizontal and Vertical Refresh Rates; Screen Size If it's not perfect, quickly switch back to the console, and try again. I had to play with the screen sizes a bit. A friend sug
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But, because you'll probably want to print, too, you'll need all of the follow- ing (or so a website told me, and it worked): apt-get install cupsys cupsys-bsd cupsys-client foomatic-bin samba smbclient gs-esp a2ps (You don't have to do that now | if you don't want to print, or don't want to do it through CUPS, only bother with the samba and smbclient packages. 2.2 Con guring Samba 1 I followed the instructions in the wonderful SMB HOWTO for the basic con g- uration. The netbios lines were alrea
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kernel-package) makes it really easy. But it was not to be. I managed to screw up my whole install (and the RedHat and Windoze partitions on the box as well, by accidentally installing MBRs in them!). So, don't do that. What you want to get down with is LKMs | Loadable Kernel Modules. In a nutshell, what is actually compiled into the kernel is part of the base kernel, and then you can stick modules (which you need compile separately) into a running kernel. This is what you'll need to do with smb
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. . . where \8TRACK0" is my domain, \Nori Heikkinen" is my username, and \mypassword" is my password (not really, ha ha). You can call this le what- ever you want to, and put it wherever you want. I called mine .smbmount-ned and put it in my homedir; it really doesn't matter. Now that you've got that le, you can use it to mount the share: mount -t smbfs -o credentials=/home/nori/.smbmount-ned //sambashare /mountpoint Once this works and you have the share mounted, you can then stick a sim- ila
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2.4.1 Using the CUPS browser interface CUPS' printer controls are located, conveniently, here: http://localhost:631/ There's a menu of tasks to choose from, from which you can con gure new printers and manage the jobs of already-con gured ones. You'll have to be root for this, but working through a browser that a user owns. (So, just open up your favorite browser in an X-session as you, and then enter root's name and password at the prompt.) From here, it's easy. Go to \Manage Printers," then \a
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3 External Mice This took me a while to gure out. For whatever reason, I couldn't just plug in my external USB mouse (which I needed in order to not kill my wrist on that 2 damn trackpad! ) and have it work. Instead, like with the rest of this install, I went through a whole song and dance about it. The results follow. Caveat: This is with the Dell Logitech scrolly-wheel mouse I have. YMMV. 3.1 Necessary kernel modules To see what's loaded, do a `/sbin/lsmod`. For USB input devices in general,
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3.2 Con guring X 3 Dman, of debian-user, made a nice little summary that I'm going to copy wholesale: If you want mouse in console and X: gpm reads from the mouse device itself. With a PS/2 mouse this is /dev/psaux. With a USB mouse (and devfs, I haven't used USB without devfs) it is /dev/input/mice. gpm needs to be told the correct protocol to use. For many modern mice (including mine) the protocol is 'imps2'. gpm needs to repeat with protocol 'raw'. It repeats through a named pipe, named /
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InputDevice "Configured Mouse" InputDevice "Logitech Mouse" EndSection For reference, my /etc/gpm.conf looks like this: device=/dev/input/mice responsiveness=30 repeat_type=raw type=imps2 append="" sample_rate= The important clauses there are the device, the repeat type, and the type. Mine is ImPS/2 (imps2, because it has a scrolly wheel; yours might just be plain old PS/2 ps2). 4 Con guring Sound Of the least importance to functionality, but perhaps the most importance to long-term productivity
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and to make sure it got inserted at boot time, by adding it to /etc/modules. Make sure your sound devices exist (/dev/dsp*). Mine did. At this point, try catting a wave le to your sound device, to see if that did the trick: ~ spycellar:# cat wavfile.wav > /dev/dsp Now you're almost there. You just need to add your username to the audio group, and then you should be set. 4.2 Adding Yourself to the Audio Group The easy, hackish way to give yourself permissions to use the sound devices 6 would be
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crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 19 Jun 30 12:17 /dev/dsp1 crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 35 Jun 30 12:17 /dev/dsp2 crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 51 Jun 30 12:17 /dev/dsp3 You might have to restart X for the changes to take place within X, though they should work immediately on the console. This was all it took for me. If you're still at a loss, you need more help than I can give sound-wise | good luck! 5 Rerolling your Kernel Avoid this. Even if you don't avoid it, before you attempt to re-install a kern
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con gured your shell, window manager, or any programs you've downloaded, your settings are saved there; /etc, because the system les that you spent so long getting right are saved there. The rst time, I just plain forgot; the second time, I purposely didn't back up /etc, because the system les I'd screwed up were in there, as well as the ones I wanted. Turns out I should have taken the ve minutes to weed through which were which, and to back up only the good ones, as that would have saved me
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For those as sketchy on lesystem types as I am, it seems to be pretty basic. In the README on the original ext3 download page, the author answers the journaling question: Q: What is journaling? A: It means you don't have to fsck after a crash. Basically. This is useful, because it means that every time your screen whites out and crashes while choosing the right video card (Section 1.2.1), you don't have to sit through an entire lesystem check of every inode. The lesystem still fscks itself ev
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any combination of u/g/r permissions can be speci ed by three unique numbers. `700' means that the user has read, write, and execute permissions (6+4+1) but that no one else does; `644' means that the user has read and write permissions, and that everyone in the same group and all others have only read permissions. It's easy to change permissions using this notation. To change a le to 644, for example, just do: chmod 644 file 8 Other Resources Had I been on my own for this install, I would prob
