Re: [PLUG] Debian

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

[List address re-added; it was apparently forgotten.]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 08:14:05PM -0500, Mike Pflugfelder wrote:
> 1) How long should I expect to wait to do an installation from the internet?
> I understand that everyone has different speed connections, personally I
> have cable modem at home and 400k DSL at work.  Should I be looking at
> hours?  Overnight?  Days?

With fast connections like that, you should be looking at a matter of
hours, at most.  I don't know about your cable modem, but with mine,
300KBytes/s is not unreasonable to expect, if the remote host can handle
that much.  There are fast US mirrors available (ie, http.us.debian.org
and ftp.us.debian.org); the main hostnames are served through
round-robin DNS, though, so you might need to try a couple of times
before you get a really fast one.

> 2) Is there any way to use a non-ext2 filesystem for root before / during /
> immediately after installation?  I'm thinking ReiserFS or ext3.

There is a set of boot floppies for potato available at
http://chao.ucsd.edu/debian/boot-floppies/ that support ReiserFS; the
main informational page is index.html~, but it's unfortunately served up
with a MIME type of text/plain; I had to save it and rename it in order
to see it.  The direct link to the floppy downloads is
ftp://acs-mirror.ucsd.edu/linux/debian/reiserfs-boot/current/; you want
rescue.bin, which you'll boot from, root.bin, and drivers-1.tgz (you'll
insert the last two when prompted, the former immediately after the
kernel loads and the latter will be requested later in the install
process).

I don't know if the woody (testing) floppies support other filesystems,
but I imagine they do.

You can convert to ext3 from ext2 quite easily; the basic procedure is
to run "tune2fs -j /dev/hdaXX" and change the occurrences of "ext2" in
your /etc/fstab to "ext3" for the appropriate partitions.  After that,
you can reboot.  (Not strictly necessary, but probably the easiest and
most straightforward to do and explain.)

Converting ext2 to ReiserFS is trickier; you basically want to move the
data to another partition, make a new filesystem, muck with settings in
files in /etc, re-running LILO, and so on.  Recommend you only do this
if you would feel comfortable doing it.  (I can write up detailed
instructions if you desire them.)

I wouldn't recommend trying to use ext3, ReiserFS, or the 2.4 kernel
with potato; some of the software is too old (e2fsprogs, modutils) or is
simply not in the archive (reiserfsprogs).  I'm pretty sure that some
people provide pre-compiled binaries for these packages; you'd need to
search the Debian mailing list archives for more info.  (Woody uses
newer versions of libraries like libc and such.)

If you do decide to go with potato, I'd recommend putting "deb
http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free" in your
/etc/apt/sources.list; then you're simply an "apt-get update" and
"apt-get dist-upgrade" away from all the latest security fixes.

I think I'm starting to ramble now, and I can't think of anything else
useful to add, so I'll end it here.

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/

Developer/SysAdmin for hire!   See http://www.billjonas.com/resume.html

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