In The Debian Way (2)

Since last time I have determined to install Debian, so the most urgent thing to do is to get Debian the software. You have a lot of ways, download maybe the priority choice for most users., plus you can also support the authors and maintainers by purchasing them from varied ways.

Well, you have pretty lotta choice about which kind debian to use. You could choose from stable, testing and unstable. And you may download different Debians of different size. Namely, the biz-card,net installation image, and normal full-size iso image files.

Debian officially offer users a full distribution with 7 cds.But as to normal desktop users, we only need to download the first image file. Download process will cost some time but should not be rahter time-consuming. (How about Fedora Core and Suse?)

Suppose you want to install it via harddisk just like me, so uncompress it to a new directory in either a Windows partition or a Linux one. If you are new to Debian, whose installation program is not pretty user-friendly and may be hard to understand for newbies,please do read the release note and official documentaries.

Now reboot you machine, and try to get to the Grub interface or other system loader.(Here I take Grub for instance), When you see the grub main interface, press C to activate a command line

Now load the kernel and initrd.img file. The command should be like this:
kernel (hdX,X)/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=XXXXX devfs=mount,dall
initrd (hdX,X)/initrd.img

Tips: If you are not sure about the file name of either the kernel or the initrd.img file. Press to Tab key to fill them up automatically. Plus, the two files from the official cd image will not be capable for harddisk boot. So you need to find alternative ones on the internet. (Download Link)

Now,you should wait untile the installation program is started. Select you locale and configure the basic things. Partition arrangement maybe a little chanllenging. Make sure that you have a swap partition and at least one Linux one. After that the base system will be installled to your harddisk, and you will get a basic Debian after the rebooting.

Then the Debian Package System willl help you to install extra packages to your system. However this won't be done automatically because we are doing a harddisk installation. In the base-config process. The apt system (apt is the application which will handle the installtion and removal of Debian packages for users automatically, and is well known among linux users for its super ability, and are also admired by users of other distributions too). So you need to mount your cd image to a local directory so that the system can read the packages from the mount point, otherwise you will need a CD or network connection to finish the package installation.
use ctrl+alt+2 (or 3,4,5,6,7) to acivate a console, use the blow command line to mount the image to your file system.
suppose your cd image is in a Windows partition and the parition is named as /dev/hda5, and the image file name is debian.iso..
mkdir /mnt/src
mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /mnt
mount -o loop -t iso9660 /mnt/debian.iso /mnt/src
Now press ctrl+alt+1 to go back to the installation and set the directory to the source of apt package selection. Then select the packages you need and finish it.

By now you will get a Debian completely. Then connect to the internet do some upgrading...
The next post will be about the basic configuration to the system and some introduction of hot tools available on the platform and tips about how to install them, in the Debian way..

To be continued..

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