Attempting to install Debian Sarge: A tale of woe

This is posted with the hope it'll maybe help, or at least entertain somebody. Feel free to point at me and laugh.

I cleared up some space on my Athlon 2600+ box with the intention of installing Debian Sid. I downloaded and burned 3 CDs (using jigdo). However, when I attempted to install, the installer got through the language and keyboard questions and dumped me to an ash shell.

So I went back and downloaded 3 Debian Sarge CDs. Same result.

Turns out you're supposed to either:

1) install Debian Woody, change every instance of "stable" in /etc/apt/sources.list to "testing" or "unstable" (depending on what you want), use apt-cdrom add to add your binaries CDs, then use apt-get -u dist-upgrade to upgrade the system; or

2) download the Debian-Installer ISO and install from it, adding your binaries CDs when it comes time to confgure apt.

Now, how do you know you're supposed to download the beta installer separately? Why, because you've drilled down to the /install/doc directory of the binaries CD and read INSTALLATION-HOWTO, of course. Otherwise, you might have missed it, since it's not prominently posted on the Debian site. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

So I tried to install Sarge.

I ended up trying both ways -- install Woody, then upgrade; or use the new beta installer -- with the same result.

When I told the installer to use my CDs, it scanned them, but later, when installing packages, the installer asked me over and over again to insert them, and for some reason, couldn't find them.

Even though the installer found my NIC and loaded the correct driver for it, after rebooting to the new system, my network didn't work. The agp kernel module that came with kernel 2.4.25-1-386 was incompatible with my chipset, so X wouldn't work except using the VGA driver. (Which is not a good thing when your system is set to boot to a graphical login.) My "sources.list" wasn't set to get the NVidia kernel -- not that I'm confident installing the NVidia kernel would have solved the agp problem. The final straw was when I looked at /etc/fstab and found no entries for my floppy, my CD-ROM, or my DVD-ROM. (No wonder the installer couldn't find the CDs!)

So, for now, I'm reinstalling Knoppix!!! I admit defeat. Anybody want some slightly used Debian Sid and Sarge CDs?

Eco, would never laugh at you, well maybe the avitar :D

I have been distro hopping (if not yet shopping) myself. I've got about a half dozen on the shelf, mostly debian derivatives and running a lt morphix on a very old machine for experience with the lighter GUIs.

I keep comparing everything to Knoppix. Besides the wonderful hd install script, you can't argue with something that just installs and WORKS. I have kanotix here now on the other partition and although I have finally gotten lm sensors limping along (another thread) I have battled with all the basics I took for granted in knoppix. Dialup, printing, etc - I had to go way beyond the simple configuring job I needed in knoppix to get these things going in Kanotix. Oh and sound. Eeeeek alsa. I have to rip that out and think I remember you mentioning doing the same somewhere in a thread.

I keep a close eye on linux groups in usenet and knew about the very hard debian install as well as the pitfalls with mandrake community 10. Man's appeal to me was the the new KDE (yeah, call me a sucker for a pretty face) more than even the 2.6 kernel - I don't have any hardware that would have to be served by that. But I have now a taste of the 3.2 KDE from kanotix and am no longer chomping at the bit for new knoppix.Current knoppix is just fine and dandy for me. It installs. It works. Well, what more do I really need? Yeah, a good script to install the source like Kano's for kanotix- THAT I would happiily pay for in knoppix. I think it would be darn close to perfect then.

Nish - retired kernel compiler

At a time when installing Red Hat's Fedora Core is as easy as installing Windows, literally, it's rather shocking to come up against something as difficult and unintuitive as Debian! I wasn't expecting it to be that difficult.

The package manager Debian uses is clearly superior to rpm, though, which is why I'm looking to use Debian-based distros from now on. Want to install Mozilla Firefox? Just type "apt-get install mozilla-firefox" and it's all done for you, dependencies included!

XandrOS, although it isn't free, is starting to look pretty good right now!

I may be lucky about Debian as I have sucessfully installed it on a variety of hardware without any problem including a Dell Inspiron 2500(Celeron with i810), A Dell Dimension 400(ancient PII 400 with TNT2), Xbox, A Panasonic sub-notebook with SIS chipset and strange screen resolution and a MSI MegaPC again with pretty strange hardware(SIS, six in one card reader) and a remote virtual server running uml. Oh, the latest is a colinux that runs under XP.

Every time, I just do a debootstrap to have the basic woody up and running then add the rest from various repositories.

In fact, I would say debian is the best for all the distro I have tried, including Knoppix. It is the only distro that I don't need to have any boot up media. All I need is to carry around a mini-linux with network support then I can debootstrap, on all the machine I have tried. I believe the same can be done with Gentoo but it would take more time because it likes to compile everything from scratch, not suitable for my hardware inventory.

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I may be lucky about Debian as I have sucessfully installed it on a variety of hardware without any problem including a Dell Inspiron 2500(Celeron with i810), A Dell Dimension 400(ancient PII 400 with TNT2), Xbox, A Panasonic sub-notebook with SIS chipset and strange screen resolution and a MSI MegaPC again with pretty strange hardware(SIS, six in one card reader) and a remote virtual server running uml. Oh, the latest is a colinux that runs under XP.

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Wow, sounds like you know a lot about Debian, then. The XBox sounds like it would be especially hard to configure. Don't you have to start out by defeating a built-in encryption mechanism?

I did successfully install Woody on an old K6/266 (which is probably as far as it's going to go, OS-wise). It works fine, even ALSA. I think that what really frustrated me on the Athlon was "agpgart" not loading and X not working, with no clear view of how to fix it. (Next time I'm in Powell's I'll have to look for a book on Debian.)

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In fact, I would say debian is the best for all the distro I have tried, including Knoppix. It is the only distro that I don't need to have any boot up media. All I need is to carry around a mini-linux with network support then I can debootstrap, on all the machine I have tried.

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Looks like they have a 30M ISO and several floppy images on the Debian-Installer site to let you do just that.

It was a learning experience. One of these days, I'll try it again. Thanks for listening.

And for those who want to dual-boot with Win2K or XP but don't want a bootloader to touch their existing MBR, may I suggest Topologilinux's grubinstall, available here. Works great with a hard disk install of Knoppix.

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Originally Posted by eco2geek

Wow, sounds like you know a lot about Debian, then. The XBox sounds like it would be especially hard to configure. Don't you have to start out by defeating a built-in encryption mechanism?

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Well, not a lot just being forced to do it this way(no repartitioning, no CD burner) which does teach me a bit about it. The Xbox one sounds hard but is actually simple because of my past experience with installing Debian in a constrained environment. There is some clever hack which can load linux(vmlinuz + initrd), more like a boot loader say GRUB. Once it is installed on Xbox, it is just a matter of putting the right vmlinuz+initrd(and rootfs) and it is no different than a normal PC.

On a PC, I just installed a copy of GRUB which again can load different combination of vmlinuz+initrd.

Same goes with colinux.

So once this relationship is sorted out and a little understanding of the magical debootstrap, I can install debian woody on all the machine I have been able to touch without any problem. All one needs is a simple linux with wget(to grab the debootstrap tarball). I have written a simple howto on the Xbox mailing list on how to do it with linux + busybox(that is really a minimal linux). The same can be done on almost any PC. Better yet, it can be done remotely(as one can put a simple telnetd there). That is how I did it on Xbox(it is basically headless), all from my PC. So theoretically, one can put a diskette(or CD) in any PC that has network support then remotely 'upgrade' it into a full featured linux(be it desktop or server).


BTW, colinux is a very promising alternative for those can't get away from XP. I am typing this under IE on XP with colinux-0.6 running in another window and insalling yet another debian woody with VNC server which I can VNC into and run a copy of mozilla. The only catch though is the multi-media stuff won't be able to run but that is not an issue for me as I prefer to run them on Xbox displaying on the big TV :-)


Will try to get a full featured KDE 3.2 there and see what it would be like. KDE and XP running on the same machine would be pretty interesting.

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BTW, colinux is a very promising alternative for those can't get away from XP.

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Interesting you should mention it -- one of the developers of Topologilinux (which normally installs in a couple of large files on your NTFS partition, and mounts them as a loop, if I'm saying that right) posted a HOWTO about getting Topo working with coLinux. Haven't played with it yet.

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KDE and XP running on the same machine would be pretty interesting.

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An easy way to do that is with Cygwin and KDE on Cygwin. I've got both KDE 2 and KDE 3 on my Win2K desktop. They're pretty minimal, but I can ssh into my other Linux boxes and run X apps over the network.

That was 6 months or so ago that I installed them -- since then, Cygwin/X seems to allow you to run X apps in "multi-window mode," alongside Windows apps. Gonna have to upgrade!

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Originally Posted by eco2geek

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BTW, colinux is a very promising alternative for those can't get away from XP.

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Interesting you should mention it -- one of the developers of Topologilinux (which normally installs in a couple of large files on your NTFS partition, and mounts them as a loop, if I'm saying that right) posted a HOWTO about getting Topo working with coLinux. Haven't played with it yet.

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FYI, the same thing can be done for a debian based system, again on a loopback device. In fact, I learnt something from Toplogilinux on this

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Originally Posted by eco2geek

At a time when installing Red Hat's Fedora Core is as easy as installing Windows, literally, it's rather shocking to come up against something as difficult and unintuitive as Debian! I wasn't expecting it to be that difficult.

The package manager Debian uses is clearly superior to rpm, though, which is why I'm looking to use Debian-based distros from now on. Want to install Mozilla Firefox? Just type "apt-get install mozilla-firefox" and it's all done for you, dependencies included!

XandrOS, although it isn't free, is starting to look pretty good right now!

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if this was dead, i don't mean to dig it up, but Fedora Core can be configured to use apt. That was always the first thing I did after installing it. I'm currently running Debian Sarge (i used the new Debian-installer stuff) and I can't get it to kill the X server to install my nvidia drivers. I'm going back to Fedora Core as soon as I can get to an FTP install off of two floppies (cd burner broke on me.....):S