On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 11:08:30PM -0600, Charles Blair wrote: > Thanks to several people, in particular Andrew Sackville- > West and Chris Lale, for their detailed advice with several > previous installation problems. > > I am installing Debian on an HP Pavillion machine that > does not have a network connection. I was planning to use > an "official" 15-CD set that has "Debian 3.1 Rel R4" printed > on it. The installation program did not recognize my hard > disk (I think it is a "Sata" device). However, I was able > to create a "netinst" CD on another computer which allowed > me to partition the hard disk and install a base system, but > the absence of a network connection meant I had to go back > to the CD set for further work. >
I think you may have a fundamental problem here. You are using a sarge CD-set over the top of what is probably an etch net-install. While this might give you a basic system, it will be broken in many ways. lets confirm this. type: uname -a and paste in the output. > (1) I have been able to use "aptitude" to do some further > installation but am not sure it is fully functional. The > display at the top of the screen says > > "Actions Undo Package..." > > but alt-A, alt-U, etc on my keyboard don't do anything. Ctrl-t gets you up to the menus. > > (2) I understand the normal installation process includes > an automatic installation of X that tries to automatically > figure out configuration of my hardware. Within "aptitude," > I have chosen "Tasks", "End-user", and "Gnome desktop > environment", followed by typing "g". This seems to have > installed packages, but I am still getting the > character-based login prompt, and "xinit" and "startx" don't > do anything. I'm really hoping I can get an idiot-proof > process to do this work for me! you need to hit 'g' twice. the first time shows you the planned actions and the second time does it. to see whether a package is installed, I use dpkg -l dpkg -l <package-name> will provide the installation status of the package. dpkg will accept wildcards. so for example on my current system I get this: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ dpkg -l x-window* Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Description +++-==================-==================-==================================================== un x-window-manager <none> (no description available) un x-window-system <none> (no description available) un x-window-system-co <none> (no description available) ^^---see the 'un' -- I don't actually have the package x-window-system installed. > > (3) When I've tried to install gcc-3.3 or gcc, I get a > message that libc6-dev is broken. > I suspect this is a problem with potentially mixed distro mentioned above. > (4) I confess to having a separate Windows XP partition > (/dev/sda1). On previous Debian machines, I have used > mtools to take files back and forth between the two > systems. Is this still safe? Its hard for me to say what you need here. I know in the current sid kernel, ntfs (windows xp default filesystem) is in the kernel. you might try locate ntfs. If it shows up in /llib/modules/<kernel>/fs then you're good to go. I think though that ntfs support is generally say now. I would minimise its use though, especially writing. A
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