Adventures Setting up a Debian System

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 04:24:06PM -0500, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> 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.

Well the default is to use one large partition (which is in the vast
majority of cases the correct option).

The split partition setup really does require more input and knowledge
to know what space you need in each partition.

> 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.

You can do it with 'apt-get dselect-upgrade'.  No dselect pain required.

> 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.

Did you ever run 'apt-get clean' to remove the downloaded packages from
the cache directory?  Those things add up over time.

> 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!

Boot some livecd revovery disk, and use it to resize things.

It would probably be much faster to just start over though at this point.

> There are a few other things to sort out - adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to

Well /sbin and /usr/sbin are not supposed to be in the path of regular
unix traditionally, and debian doesn't setup sudo by default either.

You can certainly add them in your .bash* files or even system wide if
desired (probably not) in /etc/profile and such.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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