I'm a non-unix person installing Debian on a PC (there will only be one user) for the first time, and have a collection of installation related questions. Perhaps someone here can help. I've already run through the entire installation process once, but during the process I had to make arbitrary decisions based on total ignorance. I'm sure things didn't turn out the way I wanted them. My approach here is to re-install (many times if necessary) until I understand the whole process.
The questions: 1. My bios (Award 4.51pg if I'm reading the version info right) supports LBA. The motherboard (Tyan Trinity AT) and hd (Quantum 3.2G) manuals seem to indicate that this will allow the system to access partitions larger than 1024 cylinders at boot time. Does this sound correct? If so, then shouldn't I be able to use a bootable partition of greater than 1024 cyls? I was thinking in terms of having one swap partition and one linux partition for everything else. Alternatively, if I should use a <1024 cylinder bootable partition in spite of this, then how big should I make it? Which elements of Debian, exactly, should I put in it? How do I tell the install program which partition to put each part of the package into? Remember that I'm a non-unix person. I cannot make sense of answers like "put /dev/xxx/yyy/ in the boot partition" without a lot of work. Not unless the install package is, at some point, going to ask me something like "choose from the following partitions which one you want me to put /dev/xxx/yyy/ into" so that I can follow such instructions blindly. Then it seems that the kernal will have to be told where each bit of the system is, although I assume that the install package does this bit of configuration automatically as stuff is installed in various partitions. 2. When it comes time to install device drivers I hit problems. First, the system tells me that if I highlight any driver and press return I will see a page telling me about the driver and giving me the option to install or ignore it. I do not get a page of information. I get one line that, for the generic cd-rom driver tells me something like "this is the generic cd-rom driver". This doesn't help much. Is there more information about the drivers that I should be able to access at this point and I just don't know how? Second, when I try to load the following two drivers: PS/2 mouse (psaux.o) and XT hard drive (xd.o) I get the following error message: "Device or resource busy". So I can't seem to load them. Presumably I will need a driver for my hard drive if the OS is to be able to access it. How do I load these drivers? Third, when I try to install the drivers I get a screen asking me to give it whatever command line parameters I think should be provided to the drivers when they are activated. In order to answer this I need a description of what parameters are allowed for each driver, what they mean, etc... Where do I find all this info? 3. Dselect. Powerful program. Steep learning curve. Problem. I would like to use dselect to custom install packages. I activate the select option and get a list of packages to select from. No problems so far. Part of the list was of packages that were listed as "no longer available". I want back to the main menu and used the update option to get a list of all of the packages avilable on the main Debian cd-rom (figured I'd hit the contrib cd-rom after I finished with the main one). The new list really didn't seem to be related at all to the old one. Weird, but I started selecting packages from the new list anyway. Got stuck. Managed to find my way back to the main menu. Determined to go back to where I got stuck I choose the select option again. This time I get a new list of packages entirely different from either of the previous two lists I'd seen. Conclusion: I'm missing something fundamental about dselect. I can't seem to get a consistent list of all of the packages that I have to choose from on the main cd-rom. 4. I decided to install the packages selected anyway, just to see what that part of the process is like. This bit took a long time, with many interruptions to ask me questions that I couldn't comprehend. Like "What priority should I give this package?". The help seemed to indicate that this means something like "You click on a gif file, and the highest priority package associated with files of type gif is the one that this will activate". But I suspect that this is not what the help means. And if it is then how do I select a priority when, being ignorant of the relative merits of the packages being loaded, I have no way to know what priorities I want? With luck solutions to these issues should be enough for me to make a second shot at a much better installation. For the record I have looked at the faqs and installation guides (printed out at least 400 pages of various Debian and Linux install info off the net before hand, 'cause I didn't think I'd be able to access them on-line during installation) as well as a couble of Linux books from the local library. I can't seem to find the answers I'm looking for in any of them. Thanks, Kevin
