I installed newly released Etch (Debian 4.0) on my other system which has Gentoo on it. I wiped it all because I didn’t have the time to maintain it. It’s a Pentium-III Celeron (Coppermine) 950 MHz with 128MB RAM and 20 GB HDD. Compiling takes time on this machine.
Installation
I just downloaded the net install CD. You can download it from here. It’s 158.9 MB. After burning iso CD and booting up, installation started. First it couldn’t detect the correct screen size and gave me message to select or continue. This might be because of i810 Intel graphics card. If you encounter something like this just hit the spacebar to continue, it’s not a big problem. Then I did the usual things: selecting language, country, partitioning (full hdd), timezone, user and root setup … When I come to the package manager configuration to select network mirror and hit Yes, I stuck.
I waited maybe 10 minutes but no luck. I made a hard reset and at the same place I select No for network mirror. I installed a minimal system without desktop. I’d like to configure them later.
Post Install Configuration
Since I had the problem with network mirror configuration, I setup the network after the initial boot up. I logged in as root and just edited interfaces file:
# nano /etc/network/interfaces
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.2.11
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.2.1
then turn off and turn on eth0:
# ifup eth0 down
# ifup eth0 up
I edited the apt sources file:
# nano /etc/apt/sources.list
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 200
70407-11:29]/ etch contrib main
#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 2007
0407-11:29]/ etch contrib main
#Main
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
#Security
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
#Multimedia
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main
Multimedia source needs a keyring:
#apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring
I updated package list and installed essentials, KDE, kdm and Xorg:
# apt-get update
# apt-get install build-essential kde kdm xorg
I changed the video driver in xorg.conf:
# nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
# Driver "vesa"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:1:0"
EndSection
Time server, ssh, synaptic:
# apt-get install ntp ssh synaptic
Now, some multimedia, plugins and non-free stuff:
# apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-fonts sun-java5-plugin flashplugin-nonfree acroread acroread-escript acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread mplayer mplayer-skin-blue mozilla-mplayer w32codecs mplayer-doc
It’s time to fire up. I exited root and logged in as a user and typed startx. That’s all. I think it’s pretty easy and clean. Apt makes the installation really easy. Editing source file is very simple. Debian is stable and easy to maintain. You can check out http://lunapark6.com/debian-40-etch.html and linuxforums for more information.
