Installing Debian Sid: A tale of glee

[eco2geek]

(As opposed to my previous failed attempt in May. )

Installing Debian Sid's gotten quite easy with the Debian-Installer. Here's a step-by-step review.

• With a broadband Internet connection, it's easy to install over the 'net. I downloaded and burned the Debian-Installer "netinst" CD image, booted from it, and followed the prompts (it goes fast if you've prepared your hard disk partitions in advance and know where you want / and /home and swap mounted).
• At the installation CD's boot prompt, I chose the 2.6 kernel.
• After installing the base system and the boot manager, the installer rebooted the system and asked what kind of system I wanted. You can choose "Graphical Desktop" (I think that's what it was) and from amongst several server options. This time, I chose not to go into "dpkg" (going through it took forever); I only chose the desktop option. At this point, the installer began downloading and installing packages from the 'net. It downloaded GNOME, KDE, and several other smaller window managers, along with a slew of software. (This took about 30 minutes.)
• It started up using gdm as its login manager and GNOME, with the wrong screen resolution (my fault; 85Hz was probably too high a vsync setting). Personally I'm a KDE and kdm partisan. Setting KDE as the default was as simple as telling gdm to start KDE; it asked if I wanted to make KDE the default. (Nice.) I had to download kdm, at which point the package manager asked me which login manager I wanted to use, gdm or kdm. (Nice again.) To fix the screen resolution, I logged out of KDE, stopped kdm, and ran "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86".
• Now I had Debian Sarge. To upgrade to Debian Sid was a matter of stopping X, changing "testing" to "unstable" in /etc/apt/sources.list, commenting out the "security" line, and running apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. (Downloading the software took about 15 minutes.)
• The system required a reboot to reconfigure itself for the kernel modules.

And that was it!

Unlike last time, I had no problem whatsoever with the "nv" server and my nVidia graphics card. It installed kernel 2.6.8-1-386. There's more to do -- for example, CUPS and ALSA aren't installed yet -- but that was pretty easy.

[Harry Kuhman]

OK, good timing, I'm sitting in front of a new-to-me old computer that I've been beefing up to become my Linux system. Just finishing up my small Windows partition and making sure all of the hardware is right. In the next few days, maybe later tonight, I'm planning to install several different versions of Linux (sequentially, not all at once) into the remaining 90% of the hard disk. I'll assume from your starting this post that you're offering your brain up for picking.

I downloaded a "business card Debain" a few weeks ago. It seems to be an installer, not really a live CD (as far as I can tell, I could be wrong, wouldn't be the first time). How does using this "Business card CD" differ from what you did and are there any pros and cons of each?

I understand that sarge is the next release canidate and less bleeding edge than sid. I'm too new to Linux to catch the fine points. Would I be best off to stay with sarge (in that I would be less likely to end up hitting bugs and not know if it was the release or my own limited and confused knowledge of the OS), or are there things in sid (like better hardware detection) that would make it worthwhile for a novice to take the extra step to get it?

[chris-harry]

yay... are you having a party... *pulls out some grog*.... because i brought the grog...

[eco2geek]

Cool! I could use some grog!

Harry: (I asked on IRC...) The "netinst" ISO contains the installer and the base image -- the very least Debian you need to install to get a running system. The business card ISO contains only the installer. It has to go out on the net and download the base image.

I don't know enough about the differences between Sid and Sarge to give a good answer to your second question, except to say the obvious -- Sarge is less buggy than Sid because it's been way more extensively tested. And it's got security updates. Sid doesn't (except to do another dist-upgrade). Another obvious thing is that Sid installs a lot of new daemons whose purpose I am not familiar with...

One thing I forgot above that was pointed out to me: You don't install Sid with the Debian-Installer, you install Sarge and then upgrade to Sid.

[markb]

One thing I forgot above that was pointed out to me: You don't install Sid with the Debian-Installer, you install Sarge and then upgrade to Sid.

Or you could simply install Kanotix which is almost pure Debian Sid with some of Kano's brilliant scripts to configure it for your machine.

I tried the latest Sarge installer and I agree it is good - but sound didn't work out of the box, the screen resolution and font's weren't right. etc. Kanotix gets this stuff right and you still end up with a sid/unstable which you can apt upgrade freely.

[Harry Kuhman]

Or you could simply install Kanotix which is almost pure Debian Sid with some of Kano's brilliant scripts to configure it for your machine..

I have a few different distros here that I want to play with, just to see the pros and cons of each. Kanotix is one I intended to try to install (I have version 9 on CD and have run it from CD just fine), but I figured I would do that for the experience of having done it, and then wipe out the partitions and move on to sarge. My reasoning is that I see so many people on this website that have problems after a Knoppix install - with what seems like they should be very simple issues to resolve (like even wired networking through a direct connection seems to break after installing to HD even when it worked from CD). Knowing that Kanotix is Knoppix based, I kind of expect problems like this also, or at least problems with mixing parts of woody, sarge and sid, which seems to be another problem that Knoppix users are frequently told is why they have problems with ap-get and upgrades. I have heard that Kanotix is better for hard drive installs, but better is a very relative term. I don't want better, I want good, and better than installing Knoppix might still not be good. Are the problems I'm concerned about resolved for Kanotix?

Also, I wasn't planning on going to the bleeding edge of sid, at lesast until someone gave me a reason why I would want it over sarge. I'm too novice to be finding and reportiing bugs. I'll assume any problems I come across are due to my limited knowlede of Linux. So is there any reason I would want sid or Kantonix and you still end up with a sid/unstable over sarge?

Not that I'm completely ruling out living with Kantonix for a while, but I want to know what would be the best approach to take, and I really wonder if using Knoppix or any Knoppix derived system that was intended for Live CD use will be as good for HD install as a normal install of Debain right to hard disk. I would certainly rather have a chat with some dialog box about my sound card than have to track down cryptic permissions to get my network running or find I couldn't install something because my system was a mix of multiple releases.

[CrashedAgain]

I have a few different distros here that I want to play with, just to see the pros and cons of each. Kanotix is one I intended to try to install (I have version 9 on CD and have run it from CD just fine), but I figured I would do that for the experience of having done it, and then wipe out the partitions and move on to sarge.

Sounds what you really want is a multi-boot system. It's quite easy to do: Set up about 4Gig partition for each distro you what to test, with the first distro put lilo on the mbr then with all subsequent installs put lilo (or grub) on the partition. Then just add the 2hd distro to the original lilo as an 'other'. It will then boot into the partition lilo on the sceond distro.
They can all share the same swap file but don't try to get fancy & have them share a separate /home partition, there are just too many setup files in /home.

problems after a Knoppix install - with what seems like they should be very simple issues to resolve (like even wired networking through a direct connection seems to break after installing to HD even when it worked from CD). Knowing that Kanotix is Knoppix based, I kind of expect problems like this also, or at least problems with mixing parts of woody, sarge and sid, which seems to be another problem that Knoppix users are frequently told is why they have problems with apt-get and upgrades. I have heard that Kanotix is better for hard drive installs, but better is a very relative term. I don't want better, I want good, and better than installing Knoppix might still not be good. Are the problems I'm concerned about resolved for Kanotix?

Having tried it, I think Kanotix has less problems than Knoppix.
I think most of the problems with Knoppix HD setups are the result of poorly installed packages, not the result of being designed to run from CD. Example: Attempting to upgrade Knoppix 3.4 resulted in problems with the packages 'joe' and 'frozen-bubble'. This was caused by something wrong with 'joe' and a missing file in the frozen bubble package; nothing whatsoever to do with being CD runable. Most apt-get problems are caused by broken packages or install conflict, again nothing to do with CD runable. Mixing Sarge & Sid has often been blamed but there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this, Debian even has how-tos on setting your system up so part is stable & part is testing & 'apt-get upgrade' will keep it that way. After all, if you have a Debian 'Sarge' & you decide to try the latest release of kaffeine or something so you apt-get install it, you now have a mixed Sarge/Sid system. You wouldn't expect the system to fall a part because of this.

Also, I wasn't planning on going to the bleeding edge of sid........ So is there any reason I would want sid or Kantonix and you still end up with a sid/unstable over sarge?

IMHO bleeding edge isn't all that bleeding. All 'unstable' really means is that the release hasn't been out that long and it actually may be a better package. It may be just a simple bugfix release but it still has to start out in unstable, then testing then stable. Sometimes this takes a long time, KDE 3.1 was up to about 3.1.15 by the time it finally went into stable. KDE 3.2 came out shortly after that.

[chris-harry]

*hands the grog to eco2geek...* want some Harry?