3.7 manual install

[Tek Guy]

Howdy folks.
Let me just give you a small intro: Linux and I dont get along. We never have and judging from my recent experiences we never will. That aside, I haven't given up trying. This time around, a friend is in dire need of her own PC. All she needs to do is browse the net (via Windows connection sharing) , do email and maybe a little open office. All I can give her right now is a P100 complete with 80 megs of Ram and 3 Gigs (via 2(!) HDDs ). Being that Linux is infintely more powerful and -whats even more important - safe than Windows for this configuration, I went and tried several distros. SUSE did not want to cooperate at all. Also, it was much too large. So I started to look around for compact distros. One Distro I was almost happy with was Damn Small Linux. It was only 50 Megs in size, did browsing and emailing and installed in a jiffy. However I don't have a clue how to a) change the system language to german - keep in mind it is only 50 megs big, and thus only comes in english. Also it b) lacked a proper browser, Dillo does not even handle frames. Instead of trying to fiddle around with a system I hardly know anything about, I looked around for a system that already comes with the proper configuration. You all know where I went next.

After some trouble with knoppix not accepting existng linux swap partitions during boot (only FAT), i finally made my way to a decent X Windows System. Being that it still runs off a CD, performance is sluggish to say the least. I sincerely hope I can get decent performance out of the system, even it it means changing the shell to something less fancy (suggestions appreciated)

But essential for this is getting it on HDD. knoppix-installer does not work in text mode. So i followed the suggestion and went X. However, the script seems to be really buggy. I even downloaded and ran the newest veriosn i can find, but still after system selection a help file about xdialog pos up, the setup is exited.

So unless somebody can suggest a working script, I would really appreciate any pointers toward a manual installation howto or similar help. thanks.

[eon]

Hi, You say that the knoppix-installer command doesn't work in text/terminal mode.
Are you doing "sudo knoppix-installer" ? see: http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Install_HowTo

[Tek Guy]

yup, I am. It runs up to the point of system selection and then quits saying there is an error and something about a radiolist.

I am a beginner with linux, but I can still follow instructions properly.

[spottyrover]

check out some one of the other knoppix forums on "other live cd's" this has some smaller versions of knoppix on it which might suit an older PC

[mr_ed]

I can still follow instructions properly

So can my dogs, sometimes, but my wife used to say I couldn't at all!

Instead of beating on a distro that's made to run from CD - either one too small like DSL or one too big like Knoppix - how about a regular distro that lets you pick what you want and has German localization of both the installed system and the installation process:

• (1) - Debian woody from CD set;
  (2) - Debian sarge from CD set;
  (3) - Debian sarge installer + net install;
  (4) - Debian sarge installer + CD install;
  (5) - Progeny Debian from CD

(These aren't in any kind of order - the numbers are just for reference.)

The Knoppix errors you got are pretty strange. And Knoppix is a tweaked Debian. Still, one of these five stands a good chance of working.

(1) Woody is Debian's official, "stable" release, but it's getting really old. That may not matter for a P100. There are 7 CDs in the set, but you need only the first 2 for a desktop.

(2) Sarge is the "testing" release right now, but it'll become the stable version soon. There are 14 CDs in this weekly-snapshot set - just get the first 3.

(3), (4) The sarge installer - also called the Debian Installer and netinst - is pretty slick. You download one 108-MB CD, which brings the system almost up to a base configuration. For the remaining 73 MB of base packages - plus anything else you want to add - you install over the internet or from the CDs in (2).

(5) Progeny used to be a commercial distro, but now it's free as the breeze. The company was co-founded by Ian Murdock, who also founded Deb-Ian. So it's rooted solidly in Debian. (But you'll notice that the installer is different - it uses anaconda from Red Hat.) Just get the first CD - the second has development tools, and the others are source code.

I installed all of these except (2) (which wouldn't boot for me) over the last couple of days to make sure they worked and see what the installed sizes came to. There's a size for the base installation and one for a basic, bloated desktop. (Except that for woody I only installed X windows, "desktop environment," games, and "German environment.")

• (1) - woody 3.0 r4- 233 MB base - 640 MB desktop;
  (2) - sarge 2005-03-12 - wouldn't boot;
  (3) - sarge net-install - 356 MB base - 1.7 GB desktop;
  (4) - sarge installer + disks - 345 MB base - 1.7 GB desktop
  (5) - Progeny 2.0 DE RC2 - 140 MB custom/minimal - 1.3 GB "Personal Desktop"

Base configurations give you a console (command line) - no GUI. But you get the apt tools, which handle dependencies between programs. The apt-based GUI tools - synaptic, gnome-apt, kpackage - are even better.

With (3) you download 530 MB of packages to bring the system from not-quite-base to "Desktop environment," but it takes as long as downloading a full 700 MB CD because you're fetching 718 separate pieces of software instead of just hitting a groove and downloading one big file.

When you're done you may need to tweak where the system looks the next time it wants to upgrade or add software. That's easy, it's the file /etc/apt/sources.list - come back if you need help with it.

Basic info is at http://www.debian.org and http://componentizedlinux.org. For downloads:

• (1) http://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/
  (2) http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/cd-images/debian-weekly/i386/
  (3), (4) http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
  (5) http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/linux/iso-i386/

I hope this helps!

-- Ed

[brianez21]

Howdy folks.
I went and tried several distros. SUSE did not want to cooperate at all. Also, it was much too large. So I started to look around for compact distros. One Distro I was almost happy with was Damn Small Linux. It was only 50 Megs in size, did browsing and emailing and installed in a jiffy. However I don't have a clue how to a) change the system language to german - keep in mind it is only 50 megs big, and thus only comes in english. Also it b) lacked a proper browser, Dillo does not even handle frames. Instead of trying to fiddle around with a system I hardly know anything about, I looked around for a system that already comes with the proper configuration. You all know where I went next.

You can do a Poor Man's install which is pretty easy to do without a script.
1. Partition your harddisk
2. Format the partition (ext3 is nice) + mount it
3. Copy the files in /cdrom to the new partition
4. Make a GRUB config file in a folder called /boot/grub on the new drive
5. Install GRUB to the MBR

OR: If you want you can use another smaller Knoppix-based distro such as Feather or May.