debian renovation

[Fraser Campbell]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 04:16:19PM -0400, David J Patrick wrote:

> I have a somewhat munged debian install (born of Knoppix 3.2 HD install)
> and want to make thing right.
> I plan to use the latest Bonzai, and then bump that install up to
> "unstable".

If Bonzai is a pure Debian system then that's probably reasonable, otherwise 
I'd just use Debian's installer, it isn't pretty but it's reasonably 
straightforward for i386.

Even if you go with unstable for the install I would "dumb" it down to at 
least testing after that ... and then to stable once the new Debian release 
is out (RSN ;-).  If you constantly track unstable (and even testing 
sometimes) you'll find yourself in pickles like you're in now ... rarely 
fatal but you need a good understanding of the package manager to resolve 
them.

The new Debian installer (still being developed) does a pretty good job of 
hardware detection, you just need to download two floppies, everything else 
is downloaded from the Internet (including most of the installer itself).  
Particularly if you have a spare machine you might want to try this to see if 
it is good enough.

Just grab boot and root floppies for the installer from 
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy/
If CD is preferred, daily built minimal isos (25MB) are downloadable from 
http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/daily/ ... the installer is still in 
development so there's a small chance that the image you grab might be broken

> Any hints, warnings or favorite how-tos ?

Here's how I always do it ...

Install bare minimum.  You'll have a system that boots and takes 100-200 MB of 
diskspace (assuming testing/unstable).  After installation is "complete" then 
you can begin the customisation process:

- run tasksel for easy installation of large group of packages (i.e. X core)
- selectively run apt-get install ...

If you're a kde fan then I'd look for kde packages like this:

  apt-cache search kde | grep ^kde

"apt-get install kde" might do it all but if you're using unstable you can 
never trust that there are no conflicts.

> And before I do it I want to clear some space. What are the prime
> candidates for file slaughter ?
> locales ? logs ?
> /var/cache/archives ?

How do you plan to do the new install?  Is your disk partitioned (i.e. 
is /home, /var, etc separate from /)?  Is there data on your machine that you 
care about, how have you backed it up?

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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