On 23 Feb 2002, Paul McKinley wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am new to Debian Linux. I have a very slow internet access and its not
> flat rate. How would I go about downloading the bare minimum in order to
> get a Linux box to boot? My system is an AMD Athlon 1.33GHz, with 1GB
> RAM. I need no sound, I do need Ethernet drivers, my cards are Kingston
> KNE100TX, and AMD PCnet. I need a bare minimum kernel with which I can
> build the 2.4.17 kernel; I therefore need GCC and the kernel package. I
> need not have X to begin with, just be able to get it once the kernel is
> booted.
>
> My mainboard is ASUS A7V 133, my harddisks are on a Promise ATA100 RAID
> controller and two are in RAID-0, two are in RAID-1. My cdrom drives are
> on the standard IDE controllers.
I would have thought that the best thing to so was to burn Debian CDs. It
sounds like you will need woody. There are unofficial woody CD images;
check out www.debian.org/CD. Of course you will need access to a CD burner
and a fast connection, but you can also buy the CDs.
Keeping Woody up to date over a slow non flat rate connection would be a
drag, though. If you have somewhere with a fast connection, perhaps you
can take it there to be updated periodically.
> I have Windows 2000 (SP2) installed already, so ideally would like to
> dualboot. I have had some bad experiences with Linux installers
> overwriting the windows bootloader, how do I avoid this?
I'd use grub. Easy to use, but be careful to modify menu.lst before you
reboot; read the documentation carefully. The Debian packages doesn't
create quite the right menu.lst automatically. Grub will write over the
MBR but you should be able to boot Windows anyway. My understanding is
that it hands over the booting process to the Windows bootloader. This is
called chainloading. Check out the documentation. The default for Windows
generated in menu.list always works for me, but note that I've always had
Windows installed in the first partition. I think it is a little bit more
complicated (but not much) if you don't have Windows installed in the
first partition.
Sincerely, Faheem Mitha.
