At 09:48 PM 02/20/02 -0800, Osamu Aoki wrote: >There will be "incident" if you upgrade many times. That is why it is >called "testing", or "unstable". "incident" can be dealt with minimum >trouble if you know how. > > http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/quick-reference/
I've read that. Nice work, thanks! It's helpful, but I need to read it again. >> I've installed about six times over the last week. Starting with >> Potato CDs, and for about the last three times using floppies. Mostly >> I'm repeating the installation because I ran out of salt to rub in my >> cuts. > >Sounds like you may have a bad CD and creating FD from CD. No, I'm creating using dd on another linux machine to write the images to floppy, and then using cmp to check them. > >> I managed to get good diskettes for all except driver-4. > >Use IDEPCI image. You may not even use driver disks. :) Yes, I wondered. Any idea of a rtl8139 network driver is in that image? >Before installing, you can go to console by pressing ALT-F2. Then use >editor to edit /etc/sources.list. You can skip most minimum potato >install downloads. That is a small trick. Edit it how? You mean add the testing URLs? I did that, but again, I found it more reliable to do a complete upgrade for each step. Believe me, I've been looking for all the short cuts I can find! ;) >You can unselect it by pressing "_" for large package such as tetex and >emacs. dselect autoselect basic packages. Yes, those were the killers. >> It's not a smooth process. For example, I'm mounting to /home >> /dev/hda3 an existing partition. Using the driver disks Potato >> doesn't umount my that partition on first reboot, so I have to wait >> while 60GB is checked. Not to mention how much time it all takes. > >Why mount? You can manually umount it. fstab just needed to be >edited. Right, but I wonder if that's an error in the config scripts. I Activated an Existing Partition via the menu, but when it rebooted it hadn't been umonuted. So maybe it forgot it had mounted it in the first place?? >Put them all in /var/cache/apt/archives/ then you are all set, >I think. Try it and tell me what happens. I did that. I did two installs today. The first time I tried to be tricky: - booted with rescue and root floppies. - Alt-F2 and insmod my network card module from floppy - did base install off the debian site - copied .deb files to the /var/cache/apt/archives directory (from a second partition) - then cycled through apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade. And indeed, it seemed like the .deb files were being used. But the upgrade failed badly and let the machine in an unstable state. So I started all over again, using the driver-? disks, and dselect instead and it went smooth. I still copied the .deb files back into the cache, but it didn't seem to install much faster -- still fetched most packages from the debian mirror. (I thought dselect was just a front-end for apt-get, so I wouldn't have thought there would be a difference in the use of cached .deb files.) Anyway, I've decided to move to a new headache: trying to get XFree86 working. I'm using 4.1, but still a 2.2.19 kernel. I need to figure out how to move down to 1024x768 and how to keep the mouse from hanging... What fun. I've got a "Micron" 19" 900LX display. Anyone know the available config settings? -- Bill Moseley mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
