Linux - Debian Install - March 2002

The Linux SIG met in March and started loading the Debian Linux distribution onto the computer club Windows/Linux computer. Debian has four distributions: stable (potato), testing (woody), unstable (sid) and experimental. One SIG member had purchased a Debian distribution off the Internet, and I was disappointed to see that the version being sold was potato. Potato is getting a little old and I recommend woody over potato. If you read the Debian web page at www.debian.org, you see that potato is about to be retired and woody will become the stable version. My two disappointments with potato are these: it has X-windows version 3.3.6 and it does not have KDE. The woody version has X-windows 4.0.1 and has KDE2 and GNOME.

One Debian user that I met at a Greater Seattle Linux Users Group meeting www.gslug.org is more adventuresome than me and is using sid. If you subscribe to the Debian support list at debian-user-digest@lists.debian.org you will see that many Debian users are using sid.

The purpose of the four different versions of Debian is to have more experienced Linux users testing new or beta versions of software. As software passes a testing phase with experienced Linux users it slowly gets bundled into versions intended for a wider audience. You decide which Debian version you wish to use.

We loaded the Debian base system. During this installation, we reviewed the partitioning of the Linux hard drive. Microsoft Windows software is located on the C: or /dev/hda hard drive. SuSE and Debian Linux are loaded on the /dev/hdb hard drive. Back when we installed SuSE, it had created three partitions:
a 130 Mb swap partition,
a 20 Mb partition mounted as /boot and
a 7 Gb parti-tion mounted as /.
We had about 11 Gb of free space available to load Debian. This is way more than enough disk space. I read about one experienced Debian user on linux-list@ ssc.com that created a tiny Linux system with only 70 Mb of installed operating system software! Generally speaking though, a modern Linux installation with X-windows, a GUI desktop like KDE or GNOME and some office software will be more like 600 Mb.

I created a new swap file for Debian - this was not required, two Linux distributions on the same computer can share one swap file, but I thought that the 130 Mb swap file was too small. The rule of thumb is to create a swap file that is larger than your RAM. Since the computer club computer has 256 Mb of RAM, I thought that the 130 MB swap that had been created by SuSE was too small. We have lots of disk space on this computer, so we created a 500 Mb swap file. Swap in Linux is different than under Microsoft Windows, swap is permanently allocated and cannot be used for storage of installed files, but it will work as additional (slower) RAM. We finished the installation of the base system and defined a root and user login accounts. The user login account and password is are listed on the computer.

We took the default installation of lilo. This means that we overwrote the master boot record and set the computer to boot to Debian Linux. It was late and we quit for the night. A few days later, I got a call from the computer room sysop - he was wanting to work in Microsoft Windows and the computer would only boot to Debian Linux! This could be fixed and here is how. Instructions for this are available on the Internet at: linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/ Multiboot-with-LILO.html.

You need to log into Linux as root and edit the file /etc/lilo.conf and add these lines:
other=/dev/hda1
table=/dev/hda
label=windows
Then you run the command:
lilo -D windows
This accomplishes two things. Adding the three lines into /etc/lilo.conf and running the lilo command allows booting to Microsoft Windows. Further, running the lilo command with the -D windows parameter makes booting to Windows the default.

How do you edit a file with a Linux base installation? Debian installs the nano editor and RedHat installs pico. Both are small, command line editors with on-screen prompts to explain their editing commands. Later, when X-windows is installed, we can load a better editor: nedit. Nedit has pull-down menus, column cut and paste, and macro capabilities. Every Linux distribution also installs the vi editor, but vi does not teach a new user how to use vi.