My preferred way of installing Debian is booting from a livecd like Knoppix and then using debootstrap. This is a fast and flexible way of getting a system running and results in a very clean installation. Unlike the old Debian installer and the New installer, this makes setting up an entire system on a software RAID 1 system very easy. Besides that, Knoppix supports more hardware than Debian installation CDs. I documented very simply and clearly how I prefer to install a basic Debian system.
btw. KANOTIX is a knoppix like distribution which is optimized for this kind of installation. -> http://kanotix.com/info/index.php
i found booting with a netinstall cd (100mb) very handy. I selected what type of system i desidered and it downloaded/installed what needed (150mb circa). Then i added packets one by one as soon as i needed them
I was excited by the title because I want to try debian on my old subnotebook, and I need a system like this because of a few considerations. Like no bootable drive except the HD.
I have one fat partition (hda1) were I keep windows 2000, and the knoppix directory and kernal from the Damn Small Linux ISO for a grub boot. I actually used this to run and do a HD install of DSL on the second partition (which for some reason thinks it is hda5 even though I have no other partitions). I set Lilo now asks me if I want to boot DSL or windows, and it runs well, but DSL is a hacked version of debian, and I really want to try some things that DSL won’t do.
I would like to junk the DSL install on the second partition and install debian. I can currently boot either to the LiveCD running from my hda1 (C:) partition, or from the installation on my second partition.
Anyone know how to do a debootstrap with this system and no special raid options?
I hope that my last comment isn’t too off topic, I was hoping to craft the message to be more about extending the authors system of installation, then completely specific to my situation. I hit submit instead of preview on accident
In any case, I forgot my email…
Well, I understand that using knoppix (or any kind of live CD, or even a home brewed initrd kernel like i do myself for other stuff), might be a nice way to install debian, in a kind of hacky way though, and i am not 100% sure that you are not missing some of the needed installation part this way, since the new debian-installer does a bit more stuff than just calling debootstrap.
On the subject of the debian-installer, i think you didn’t look at it recently, since i managed to install a raid1 setup all right almost two month ago, and on my pegasos2 powerpc box too. Here is a quick link to the latest netinst iso for you to try out :
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
As for bigger hardware support of knoppix, i seriously doubt it too, but i guess you are not speaking about real hardware diversity, like those amiga/m68k systems, or older alpha boxes, which are well supported by debian-installer now, but about random pieces of x86 hardware only.
I wonder what good in those case is the supposed bigger hardware support of knoppix, if you will have to fall back to the normal debian afterward, and possibly not be able to boot up afterward ?
Apart from that, nice article about how to use debootstrap.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
If you want to install Debian the easy way you should definitely give a try to Ubuntu (www.ubuntulinux.org). You’ll fall in love.
It says hda5 because it is a logical partition btw. Primary uses hda1-4 and logical uses hda5+.
Why do you run Win2K on a Fat Partition, why not NTFS?
Please try the new Debian-Installer. They need all the help they can get to squash bugs so that Sarge may finaly come out.
> Why do you run Win2K on a Fat Partition, why not NTFS?
I use FAT32 instead of NTFS so that I can safely write to the parition under other OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS)
Sony preinstalled Windows 2000 on a FAT partition. Its an old vaio, I guess because the drive is so small (10 gigs total for both partitions) they didn’t figure I would need NTFS’s features. Oddly the second partition, which came blank and set up for no apparent purpose, was formated NTFS.
Thanks Sven for all your effort with the Pegasos. I am looking forward to all your new releases!
🙂
Im with Sven here. Installing Debian with DI (I did it just a few hours ago on mine buddy laptop) is a breeze. It takes less than 1 hour to have basic system running, and with power of apt-get you can finetune your Debian for any (ANY) task you want. 🙂
Debian-installer does NOT support booting off RAID, and doesn’t deliver such a clean system. Same automatically goes for Ubuntu, as they use debian-installer.
Besides, jumping through all the hoops an installer presents takes much longer for me than debootstrapping
I prefer the Progeny’s approach: use a known and good graphical linux installer like Red Hat’s anaconda:
http://componentizedlinux.org/2004091401
Liked the article, very informative. Like all things debian, except the deb installer. Why so hard to make one like Knoppix, Morphix, Simply Meppis? I understand the need for extreme flexability= extreme power, but you could also offer one’s like Mepis. I use Yoper , too, because of apt-get, and 15 mins to install. So , for me, simplicity is power, as i can apt-get to any state i wish, with remove, dist-upgrade, or install. just love it, blows anything else out of the water away. As someone who spent 2 days working on three windows xp boxes (one new, one retired, and two hop-ups), dealing with linux when i get home is very nice. I still don’t get someone who is so locked into windows, and spends 2000 bucks on hardware and 1200 on software, but has no time to learn new linux os. I showed her how easy these distro’s are to use, but they don’t get it. “How do i run outlook, where’s ie explorer, where’s My documents? How come my pc slows down so much, so fast (spyware,malware, fragmented, virus, ect. ect.?” Well, I still push these down thier throats, because they realy are easy to use. Easier, than windows? oh, I’d say these ones are, as are plenty of linux, unix one’s. but run live cd’s that don’t even change your harddrives, and a reboot gives you windows back? Come on, gimme a break! That’s it, I’m raising my rates , how about 10$ more an hour, everytime you say you don’t want to learn something new?
I spent about an hour trying to help someone fix a problem with ALSA, on their Debian setup. after an hour, he casually mentions that it’s Debian Sarge, but they installed it with Knoppix.
The problem, of course, was caused by Knoppix. A real Debian machine would have been fixed within five minutes.
Knoppix is not Debian. Kanotix, Ubuntu, etc, are not Debian. If they were Debian, they’d be called Debian.
The installation described is not done with knx-hdinstall, but with debootstrap. No packages are extracted from the Knoppix CD, they are all downloaded individually from the specified mirror.
The result is a clean pure Debian system, with no Knoppix remains except for the hostname used to compile the kernel
Not impressed, guys.
This isn’t an article – this is someone’s crib sheet. In other words, a set of notes, a tick list of what to do. It’s not explained, it’s not annotated, it seems to assume a lot of odd defaults, and it’s so terse that it explains nothing of what’s being done or why.
It also assumes that the machine has enough RAM to usefully run something like Knoppix, which rules out a lot of machines which are adequately specified to make a useful server.
Just my 1st impression and $0.02 worth.
Now honestly, that is the way a tutorial should be! Thanks.
Short, clear, to the point while giving everybody experienced enough to try this, enough information to do it.
I’ve bookmarked your site for reference.
People who don’t understand it: Try Ubuntu or the regular installer.
Not much of a tutorial (tutorial -> to tutor -> to teach) but very useful indeed. I liked your fdisk instructions 🙂
Hmm…I thought everybody had pretty much given up on installing the LiveCD as it was basically fubar. I installed it once and ended up with a german desktop.
Anyway, the new debian installer does a decent job of hardware detection. I’ll go ahead and stick with Ubuntu since it’s the first linux desktop that I consider to be as fast as XP and doesn’t look like ass.
This isn’t an article – this is someone’s crib sheet. In other words, a set of notes, a tick list of what to do. It’s not explained, it’s not annotated, it seems to assume a lot of odd defaults, and it’s so terse that it explains nothing of what’s being done or why.
That is correct. I fail to see why that is bad, though. Not always is a full article the right way to spread the word.
It also assumes that the machine has enough RAM to usefully run something like Knoppix, which rules out a lot of machines which are adequately specified to make a useful server.
Yes, it assumes a reasonably modern machine. In any box where you’d use 1 GB swap space, you can expect enough RAM to run a live CD. Still, the exact same procedure can be used from a simple disk set. I choose Knoppix because it has such great hardware support and it is actively maintained. Note please that it is not necessary to use the graphical environment.
Hmm…I thought everybody had pretty much given up on installing the LiveCD as it was basically fubar. I installed it once and ended up with a german desktop.
Yes. This is not a live CD installation. It’s a Debian installation. The live CD is used only to boot from and to get a shell to run some utilities with.
Anyway, the new debian installer does a decent job of hardware detection.
But does not support booting from a RAID root filesystem.
Come on!
It only assumes you have half a brain! Surely you can extract the information you need from that article.
You can boot knoppix without all the fancy stuff, or just use some other bootable live cd supporting raid.
It’s always easier to guess why something is done that way, than guessing HOW something is to be done.
I can’t believe the amount of negative (and erroneous) comment such a great article has gotten.
If this would be the average quality off an article here on OSNews insead of all those “Look here! This is a new distro, here’s me installing it. It has some nice sides and some bad sides. The End!” OSNews would be a lot better.
If I read one more “Look, skyos looks a bit different and has support for this new thing!” article, instead of reading stuff like “Here is how you can get your toster to work as a webserver using SkyOS” I’ll go nuts.
Sure this is a “news”-site, but couldn’t the “Features” actually have something iuseful instead of articles like “Which browser is 1337?” and “Review: CrappedyCrapCrap-Linux 1.15 released!”.
I’d love to read something about how one can replace a proprietary bootloader in a linux router with a free one, and maybe install BSD on it.
I would love to see how to see more techie articles in general, and by techie I do not mean the aforementioned “Which browsers do techies use?” article, but “How to program your /dev/video0 device to send an multimedia-sms to your phone, when someone shows their face in front of it.
Sure, I’m going to get modded down, but come on, I can’t be alone in feeling this way, can I?
Juerd, have you seen :
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2004/20040930
And in particular the following items :
# Support for booting from LVM.
# Support for booting from software RAID 1 (experimental).
# Software RAID 5.
Sure, RAID 1 is marked as experimental, but this is a far cry from the “doesn’t support” you mention.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
I stand corrected.
I had only tried pre-rc1 and assumed that the one used by Ubuntu (another pre-release, downloaded 2004-10-02) would be current. These I tried and these do not support booting from RAID 1.
The other points still stand, though: using debootstrap is faster once you get used to it (I do one per week, on average) and results in a very clean, basic system.
I preferr the old installer. It’s so f*** generic, it installs on every computer in my house. The funny thing, however, is the module config menu. I have a 3c59x NIC that modprobe cant find. Despite that, it is already initialized when downloading the kernel in the previous step.
bah…
Yeah, Ubuntu does use a fork of a bit more ancient d-i, as they released earlier. It has their own improvement though.
debootstrap is nice, sure, altough in the time it takes, you don’t count stuff done per d-i, like partitioning, and it mostly depends on the installation method (pure netboot or cd). Also, i believe that some things, like adding modules not autodetected to /etc/modules, and some of the language stuff, are done by d-i outside of debootstrap, and those you lose.
Also, if you are interested in a real fast way, you can use partimage, which even has a network backup/restore system, or even stuff like FAI.
But like said, nice explanation of the debootstrap way.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
I did count time like partitioning. When you’re used to fdisk, it goes a lot faster and easier than struggling to do the same with a menu based interface like debian-installer’s or cfdisk’s.
As for modules, I don’t use them on servers.
The language stuff: I prefer my systems in English, if only because with Dutch error messages you cannot Google for the solution as easily.
I don’t “lose”, but “win”, because I get the system the way I want it, with no configuration in a state that I hate. And whatever configuration needs to be done, it’s usually done faster with a simple command in a root shell than with that menu. The only difference is that I have to think about it myself, and the installer gives you the screen anyway.
Thank you for the reference to partimage. I’ll have a look soon.