KNOWHOW INSTALLING DEBIAN 2.2
Setting up Debian
GNU/Linux 2.2   Potato
HOT
POTATO
FRANK RONNEBURG
The new version of Debian s distrib-
ution is just about to arrive. Version 2.2
will be released for the Intel 386, Alpha,
Sparc, M68k and PowerPC. What advantages
does it have to offer? What has changed? Is it worth
upgrading? What problems will you be letting yourself in for?
It s often said that Debian GNU/Linux is  the distrib- you are setting up a server, a graphical interface is
ution for professionals only or  not for begin- unnecessary and often undesirable. Secondly, this
ners . There s also a commonly held view that means that Debian GNU/Linux can be installed on
installation can be pretty complicated. The reason many older, lower-performance systems on which
that Debian GNU/Linux is used by a great many Lin- trying to run X11 would be no fun at all.
ux professionals, however, isn t because you need If you are familiar with Debian from older ver-
to be a professional to manage to install it. No, it is sions you ll know that upgrades to a newer version
the high quality of the distribution and its indepen- can be accomplished without any difficulty. Thus,
dence from any commercial supplier that is convinc- there is rarely any reason to perform a new installa-
ing more and more people to try it. Just like the Lin- tion which perhaps would warrant a lavish graphical
ux kernel, Debian GNU/Linux is supported world- installation routine. In general, a Debian GNU/Linux
wide by more than 500 maintainers system is installed once only.
Installation of Debian GNU/Linux isn t accom- At first glance very little has changed on the
plished using a user-friendly graphical interface. installation side since version 2.1. Installation is still
Whilst this may be viewed as a disadvantage, partic- largely undertaken by the program dbootstrap. If
ularly by newcomers to Linux, there are two good you have already installed version 2.1 (slink) you will
reasons for dispensing with such a luxury. Firstly, if find things very familiar. During the installation
56 LINUX MAGAZINE 2 · 2000
INSTALLING DEBIAN 2.2 KNOWHOW
many different options are available at each step.
10 step installation
For example, you can boot from an IDE CD-ROM
and then continue the rest of the installation from a As far as installation goes, Debian GNU/Linux differs from other distribu-
SCSI CD-ROM if you want to. How many other dis- tions only in a few details. Most notably, you have a great deal of freedom
tributions let you do that? and can control the process to a fine degree of detail if you want to. It s up
The diversity of options available during installa- to you.
tion has contributed to the reputation Debian " 1. Space: You must have one unassigned or spare partition, or one com-
GNU/Linux has for being difficult to install. Howev- pletely empty hard disk. If you don t have a spare partition use the fips
er, for the great majority of installations most of the program (which is found on the CD under install/) to reduce the size of
options won t even be required. The default values an existing partition.
are nearly always the most sensible and correct " 2. Boot: When you restart the computer you can either boot directly
choice allowing you to install Debian GNU/Linux by from the CD-ROM or create boot diskettes from the files rescue.bin and
repeatedly pressing the Enter key. root.bin as well as driver-1.bin, driver-2.bin and driver-3.bin which you
will find in the directory dists/stable/main/disks-ARCH/current/disks-1.44/
on the CD-ROM. Here, ARCH is to be replaced by the name of the respec-
Installation improvements
tive architecture, for example i386 or m68k.
Network configuration has been simplified in com- " 3. Questions: Respond to all questions from the Debian GNU/Linux
parison to version 2.1, as long as a functioning installation program with the Enter key if you are unsure of the correct
DHCP server is present on the network. In addition, reply.
the program taskselect has been integrated into the " 4. International: Select the desired keyboard layout.
installation sequence. Another change since Debian " 5. Partition: Create at least two partitions in the free hard disk space.
2.1 is that the option for choosing a server or a Use one as swap and the other as the root partition.
workstation system during the installation is no " 6. Kernel: Install the kernel and the modules from the CD-ROM.
longer irreversible. At any point (even after installa- " 7. Elements: Select the required modules for your system.
tion of the base system) you can now restart the " 8: Base: Install the base system from the CD-ROM or another medium.
installation program and make more selections from " 9. Time: Select the appropriate time zone.
the list of packages. " 10. Shutdown: If you are starting the system for the first time then after
There have been many other detail improve- the kernel is loaded the installation program will ask you to specify a
ments to the installation routine. For example, at password for the root user (superuser) and create a new ordinary user.
long last the program now keeps a record of the Install the rest of the packages after you have chosen one of the precom-
identity of the CD-ROM drive so that you don t have piled configurations.
to reselect this each time.
When installing Debian GNU/Linux on different
hardware platforms the only difference you will the course of developing Debian GNU/Linux 2.2
notice concerns the partitioning of the hard disk very many of the system libraries and programs
and the initial start-up of the Linux kernel. This is were replaced by later versions. An update of these
unavoidable as there is no version of the i386 pro- libraries using dselect will fail because of the com-
gram fdisk available for other architectures. Howev- plex package inter-dependencies.
er, once the installation program has started it What you must do instead is this. Mount the
behaves in exactly the same way on all platforms. first Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 CD as Superuser manu-
Because of the different hardware, of course, there ally and change the file /etc/apt/sources.list such
are still differences to be observed, but then this is that installation can be done via a direct access to
also the case with i386-based systems. For example, the CD. The entry for this is:
i386 systems may have different types of mouse,
# - CD mounted manually under /cdrom deb fiU
which are connected to different devices. On i386
le:/cdrom/debian
systems mice may use serial or PS/2 connections
unstable main
(/dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyS1 or /dev/psaux). On the Apple
Macintosh (m68k and powerpc) the mouse is con- Now execute the command apt-get update. This
nected using the so-called ADB port, the device for reads in afresh the list of packages available on the
this being /dev/adbmouse. Later i386 computers CD. After this you can install the new libraries and
and PowerMacs use the USB connection for opera- programs with apt-get dist-upgrade. Don t worry if
tion of the mouse (/dev/usbmouse). the command fails, just start it again. When the
process has been successfully completed you can
update all the remaining packages with dselect.
Update of
If you are satisfied with your existing Debian
Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 (slink)
GNU/Linux 2.1 system, maintained over many
Of course, you don t have to re-install your entire months, and don t consider having the very latest
system if you simply want to utilise the latest pack- packages as all that important, naturally you don t
ages from Debian GNU/Linux 2.2. An existing have to upgrade to version 2.2. However, there are
Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 can be brought up to date a few packages that are worth bringing up to the
quite easily. However, it s important to note that in latest version. Firstly,many errors and gaps in security
2 · 2000 LINUX MAGAZINE 57
KNOWHOW INSTALLING DEBIAN 2.2
Fig. 1: Package
installation using aptitude
Fig. 2: Package installation
with GNOME-Apt
have been found and eliminated in the past -i package.deb. As an alternative to your Web
months. These bug-fixes include Y2K bugs. Second- browser you can use the program wget to do the
ly, you might want to install the latest version of download.
XFree86 or GNOME. If you want to do this, Debian If you want to use an up-to-date Linux kernel
GNU/Linux provides a way. 2.2.x with Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 it may be necessary
On the Web page  Vincent s Bazaar you will to install some packages from Debian GNU/Linux
find links to all of the programs and packages just 2.2. Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 came out when the Linux
described, that are appropriate to Debian GNU/Lin- kernel 2.2.x was still in development so consequent-
ux 2.1. If you use apt you can bring your system up ly not all of the packages contained in it are com-
to the latest state of development using the follow- pletely compatible with newer kernels. To determine
ing entries in /etc/apt/sources.list: the particular packages concerned, refer to the web
page:  Errata: Linux kernel 2.2.x with Slink .
deb
However, we would recommend a full update
http://www.debian.org/~vincent/ y2k-update mU
to Debian GNU/Linux 2.2. You will very quickly
ain deb
http://www.debian.org/~vincent/ slink-updatU notice that the many new programs justify the
e main deb
installation effort.
http://www.debian.org/~vincent/ xfree-updatU
e main deb
http://security.debian.org/ stable updates What s new?
Alternatively, you can copy the packages to your On now to the new packages in version 2.2. To pre-
hard disk and then install them manually using dpkg sent every one of the new packages would, of
58 LINUX MAGAZINE 2 · 2000
INSTALLING DEBIAN 2.2 KNOWHOW
course, be beyond the scope of this article, so we
apt-setup and apt-get
will just take a look at the most interesting ones.
New among the basic tools is the program APT for The program apt-setup provides a user interface for
package management. adding to the entries in the file /etc/apt/sources.list.
Apt represents the next generation of Debian With apt-setup you can use the  http ,  ftp and
GNU/Linux package management. The back-ends   filesystem methods. For the  cdrom method use
the programs that run in the background and carry is made of the program apt-cdrom. The menu entry
out the actual work  are largely complete. Howev-  edit sources list by hand invokes the editor vi. A
er, the front-ends, the programs with a user inter- single option of  probe can be supplied at the
face, are still in the course of development. start. This causes a CD-ROM that has been inserted
Apt stands for  A Package Tool . It s a program to be read immediately.
designed to assist the system administrator (in other apt-get is the actual user interface for manage-
words, you) in the installation and management of ment of packages. This command-line oriented tool
programs. The first step in using Apt is to modify is very easy to use. It has the following syntax:
the configuration file /etc/apt/sources.list. This file
apt-get [options] [command] [package ...]
contains information about the location of each
package. Since you are not likely to need some of the options
Apt supports a large number of different instal- very often we will just mention the most important
lation sources. Currently these are cdrom, file, http ones:
and ftp. Each one of these sources is specified on a " update  this updates the overview of the avail-
separate line in the file. In doing so the order is also able packages, reading in the information from
taken into consideration: entries placed higher up the files packages.gz of the respective distribution.
have a higher priority. The format of the entries can
be specified as follows:
The rise and rise of Debian
deb url distribution [component1] [componentU
" Debian 0.01 to 0.90 (August-December 1993)
2] [...]
" Debian 0.91 (January 1994): this version had a simple package manage-
The url field specifies the installation source and the ment system, with which packages could be installed and deleted. A cou-
path to the root directory of the Debian distribution. ple of dozen developers worked on Debian at that time.
On a CD-ROM the path is normally the directory " Debian 0.93R5 (March 1995): At that time one or more developers were
/debian. responsible for each package. The package management was handled
You use the distribution field to select the ver- via dpkg, which is utilised after the basic installation.
sion that you want to install. Normally, a choice is " Debian 0.93R6 (November 1995): dselect was introduced. This was the
made between stable (for the current, stable ver- last Debian version that was still based on the a.out binary format.
sion) and unstable (for the developer version.) Around 60 developers were working on Debian GNU/Linux.
The component fields refer to the different clas- " Debian 1.1 Buzz (June 1996): The first version with a so-called code name.
sifications of files in the distribution. Examples are: Like all subsequent ones, this code name originated from the film  Toy
main, contrib, non-free, non-US. One or more Story . This idea was introduced by Bruce Perens, who at that time was
entries are permitted, separated by blanks. the project leader. This version used the new ELF format as well as kernel
Here are some examples. Bear in mind that you version 2.0, and comprised 474 packages.
are at liberty to use a number of these entries in the " Debian 1.2 Rex (December 1996): 848 packages, 120 developers.
configuration file at the same time. " Debian 1.3 Bo (July 1997): 974 packages, 200 developers.
" Debian 2.0 Hamm (July 1998): The first Debian version which, in addition
deb http://www.debian.org/archive \
to the i386 architecture, also supported the m68k range of computers,
stable main contrib
that is the Amiga, Atari and Macintosh. This version, with Ian Jackson as
This entry uses the archive on project leader, was already based on the libc6 library. It had more than
http://www.debian.org with the 1500 packages and approximately 400 developers compiled the pack-
classifications stable/main and stable/contrib. ages.
" Debian 2.1 Slink (09 March 1999): From this version on, support was pro-
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian \
vided for the Alpha and Sparc architectures as well. The project leader
unstable main contrib non-free
was Wichert Akkerman. 2250 packages were included in this version,
This entry fetches the files via FTP from the directory which was supplied on two official CDs. Additionally included in the
/debian. The as yet not completed (unstable) version delivery schedule from this version on was apt, a new program for pack-
of Debian GNU/Linux is used and access is made to age management.
the areas main, contrib and non-free. " Debian 2.2 Potato (2000): Apt is a key element of this version. The num-
ber of packages has virtually doubled when compared to version 2.1.
deb file:/home/fr/debian \
Also noteworthy is the integration of GNOME, glibc 2.1, Kernel 2.2.1x,
stable main contrib non-free
XFree 3.3.6.
This entry uses a local copy of the data on the hard " Debian x.x Woody: The code name for the next version was defined with
disk. (This may also be a directory mounted through the code freeze of Potato on 15.01.2000. Development has begun&
NFS.)
2 · 2000 LINUX MAGAZINE 59
KNOWHOW INSTALLING DEBIAN 2.2
Fig. 3: taskselect  pre-configured
package selection
" upgrade  you can use this option to update all of newer version is available. Within these four groups
the packages installed on the system to the latest all packages are shown in a tree structure, which
version. All packages already installed, for which also represents the directory structure within the
a newer version is available, will be updated. Debian archive (for example: main/admin or non-
" dist-upgrade  this is actually an enhancement or US/non-free.)
extension to upgrade. By choosing this option With aptitude most of the keyboard functions
you will be ensured that packages of greatest are the same as for dselect so you should feel imme-
importance for the system are installed first. diately at home.
" install  this option is used to install packages. With its GTK+ -based interface, gnome-apt fits
Each package (the package name, such as send- perfectly into the latest Debian-GNOME desktop. This
mail, suffices here) is fetched and installed program, too, helps you to deal with all the important
according to the apt configuration. tasks that arise with package management.
" remove  this option is used to remove packages. Under the  File menu are two entries for con-
figuring the program, as well as the entry  Quit
which terminates the program.  General Prefer-
Front ends
ences allows you to remove the package descrip-
aptitude is a text-based tool for installing packages. tion from the program s main window ( Show
It follows a rather different philosophy to dselect. A package details in main window ). This gives you
strict distinction is drawn between installed, non- more space to display the package list with the vari-
installed, virtual packages and packages for which a ous categories. Here you can also alter the order of
the columns in the package list.
More interesting is the second entry  Sources .
SPI  Software in the Public Interest
Here you can specify the sources from which the
SPI is a non-profit organisation that was founded to assist projects which package information as well as the actual packages
develop software in the public interest. It encourages programmers to use are to be installed. You no longer need to use a text
the GNU General Public License (GPL) or any other licence that permits free editor to edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list. Instead,
dissemination and free usage of software. SPI encourages hardware devel- you can use a graphical user interface.
opers to publish the documentation to their work in order that drivers may The second menu entry  Actions contains the
be written for their products. actions that you want to perform on the package
SPI was founded on 16 June 1997 as a non-profit organisation in Teilstaat, list.  Update reads in the package files afresh and
New York, USA. Since then it has become an umbrella organisation for vari- updates the overview. If the files are not available
ous community projects. The statutes and certificate of incorporation on a local medium (CD-ROM or hard disk) they are
define the objectives and the way that SPI works. SPI has a board of direc- fetched using FTP or HTTP from the specified server.
tors consisting of four members: a president, vice-president, an owner and  Complete run installs the chosen packages or
a treasurer. SPI currently supports the following projects: Berlin, Debian, removes packages that are no longer required from
GNOME, LSB, Open Source, Open Hardware. the system.  Mark upgrades is equivalent to apt-
If you would like to make a donation to SPI or wish to contact it other than get upgrade and marks all new packages so that
by electronic means you can reach it at the following address: Software in they are updated the next time  Complete run is
the Public Interest, Inc. PO BOX 273 Tracy, CA 95378-0273 USA. Further selected.  Mark smart upgrade on the other hand
information about SPI can be found on the Internet. is used to update a Debian system to the next ver-
sion. This corresponds to apt-get dist-upgrade.
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INSTALLING DEBIAN 2.2 KNOWHOW
On the  Package menu the most important opers and install carefully pre-assembled groups of
Infos
menu entry is certainly  Search . Concealed within packages. A whole series of task packages are avail-
it is a truly powerful tool for locating individual able. All of these packages have a name beginning Vincent s Bazaar: UNOFFI-
packages from the extensive list. Bear in mind that with task-, so that you can easily search for them in CIAL Debian updates
searching is done here not just by the names of dselect (with the / key ) and install them. http://www.debian.org/~vin-
packages but also on the package descriptions and As an alternative to selecting these task- pack- cent/
other information. Unix experts could achieve this ages using dselect or Apt there is also a special pro-
with a skilful grep on the appropriate files but now gram specifically designed to take care of them. Errata: Linux-Kernel 2.2.x
everyone else can do it too. Using the tasksel program you can access all of with Slink
From the  View menu you should take a look at the available task packages. At the start you are http://www.debian.org/releas-
the last two entries. Here you can control the order in shown a list of the available packages. Using the es/2.1/running-kernel-
which packages are shown in the package list. Using cursor keys you can switch between packages and 2.2.de.html
 Group you define how packages are displayed. with the Enter key or spacebar you can select a
You can choose to have them sorted alphabetically, package for installation. Pressing the key again can- SPI: Software in the
by section, by priority or by status. Sorting by section cels the selection. Public Interest
is similar to dselect with packages shown according http://www.spi-inc.org/
to their association, for example admin or x11. Sort-
From a user viewpoint
ing according to status will show you the installed %
and not yet installed packages, i.e. two groups. In Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 includes the GNOME graphi-
addition, packages can be displayed according to pri- cal desktop, as well as many applications appropri-
ority, classified into: Extra, Important, No version ate to it, and based on GTK+ or GNOME. Top of the
available, Optional Required and Standard. list is, of course, the GIMP, a powerful graphics edit-
The  Order menu entry isused for sorting with- ing package. For the office user there are such inter-
in the groups just mentioned. Again you can select esting applications as Abiword (word processing)
from among the four sort orders mentioned above. and Gnumeric (spreadsheet).
Unfortunately, KDE has once again failed to find
its way into the Debian distribution. This would
Task packages
undoubtedly benefit users who could make their
If you are a newcomer it isn t easy to choose which own choise as to their favourite desktop. Unfortu-
of the more than 4,000 packages to install from nately, the revised licence from Qt (the library on
your Debian GNU/Linux packages distribution. But which KDE is based) is still not yet compatible with
even professionals can lose track of things. If you the Debian guidelines. For those interested in know-
don t want to read the specification of every pack- ing more about the background to this already very
age to decide whether it is to be installed or not you old story, take a look at http://freshmeat.net/news/
can put yourself in the hands of the Debian devel- 2000/06/17/961300740.html. %
Fig. 4: GNOME Desktop
with applications
2 · 2000 LINUX MAGAZINE 61