Chicks_Hate_Me's Journal: Debian Installation Notes

These last few days has been a pain getting Debian to work. This hasn't been the fault of Debian, but my lack of knowledge with Debian.

First thing that I experienced...

LILO

After I installed Debian without a hitch (after about the 3rd time installing, it's a breeze) I experienced a problem where it wouldn't get past LI in the LILO screen, it would just print a bunch of 40 40 40 40 40 40 across the screen. The reason was, I was booting off the second hard drive in the computer. I thought by installing LILO on the mbr would be enough, but it wasn't. After googling I realized that I needed to add these two lines to /etc/lilo.conf: (of course I had to do a rescue boot from the CD)

disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x80

I guess this overrides the default drive mapping from the BIOS. After that, I had no problems booting.

Upgrading to unstable

This was probably the easiest problem I had. I had no clue how to upgrade to unstable from stable. I posted the question in the debian-user mailing list (over here) and received helpful replies. I edited my /etc/apt/sources.list and changed everything from 'stable' to 'unstable' (except security updates) and did an apt-get update then apt-get dist-upgrade. It spewed out some errors and I tried another suggestion. Basically I ran deselect (which I used to hate) did an Update and then an Install the install went seamless but unfortunately I got confused in the keyboard configuration and basically foobar?d it (chose Macintosh usb keyboard since I was using one.) I was pretty impatient and reinstalled Debian and did the upgrade again. This time I left the keyboard config alone and everything went fine. For some reason Tasksel wouldn't work to install KDE3 so I broke down and again...used deselect. It worked fine.

Getting the damn USB mouse to work

I knew using gpm would probably be my best bet to get my mouse working. For some reason it didn't, It didn't help that usb wasn't an option for configuring gpm. After doing a little more googling I found out I need to use the option for IMPS/2 as my mouse. Still my mouse didn't work. After more googling I realized I needed to install the debian package called 'hotplug'. I reloaded gpm and wham, bam, thank you mam, I had my usb mouse working! (Yay!)

Getting X to work

Getting X to work was a biznitch. xf86cfg would run but the damn mouse didn't work! Worst of all, when running 'startx' all I would get is some mumbo jumbo on the frame buffer not working. So I figured changing the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 from:

Option "UseFBDev" "true"

to:

Option "UseFBDev" "false"

No love. I discovered doing a dpkg-reconfigure xfree86-server and following some instructions from the config file itself changed this. But still...no mouse! I realized later that I needed to change:

Option "Device" "/dev/mice"

to point to "/dev/gpmdata". Sweet! It all werks!

Getting pr0n and music from my Windows drive to work

What better way to celebrate a fresh install of debian than to watch some cdgirls? Basically I couldn't mount my ntfs partition to be accessed by normal users. This became a bitch for about 20 minutes, I finally rtfm'd and read the man pages for mount and added this line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda6 /windows ntfs ro,user,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

Basically I needed to specify the uid and gid of my username, and away I went!

My next projects are recompiling the kernel (which I have from source but not through Debian) and getting some bass out of my freggin sound card.

God I love Linux!