Adventures Setting up a Debian System

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

I am in the process of setting up a Debian system, to be a clone of
another desktop/server.  There have been a few hiccoughs:

Burned a net install disc - booted, said okey-dokey to the usual
options, including guided partitioning.  This gave me a 10Gb root
filesystem.  This will come up again later.

It started up just fine, but I wanted a "testing" system.  So, I edit
/etc/apt/sources.list to Debian testing, including the contrib and
non-free sections.

Then I ran an apt-get dist-upgrade to get all the way to testing

This worked, but it failed half a dozen times before finishing - I needed
to use apt-get -f dist-upgrade.  On the upside, the error messages
suggested the extra switch, but it did take a while.

Next, I want the same set of packages on this machine as on another
machine I've got.  To do this I use dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt
on my old machine, and dpkg --set-selections < packages.txt && dselect
install on the new machine.

It turns out, dselect had to be installed first.

Once it starts though, lot of packages get downloaded - a few Gbs worth.
It installs for a while, and then it starts throwing "I'm out of room!"
errors.  No joke, after a while it errors all the way out, and I am
using 100% of my 10Gb root partition.  I run apt-get clean, which clears
out 600Mb, and start again - all of the packages that I hadn't installed 
yet when I ran out of space just got jettisoned and need to be 
redownloaded, which is a bit of a pain.

When I finish, I'm using 89% of the 10Gb - not as much headroom for
excitable log files as you might hope for.

Aside: Does anyone know if/how I can resize the root partition - I'm using 
LVM? It makes sense to have more room, and I don't need /home to be as big 
as it is.  Thanks!

There are a few other things to sort out - adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to
my PATH so sudo actually works, permanently turning off gdm, etc.
-- 

yours,

William

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20111207/0ae5bfe3/attachment.sig>