Blogging my experiments to install a Debian distribution onto my laptop. Not sure it'll work, but I'll feel better knowing I've tried it! :)
2nd July 2002
The install went relatively painlessly last night, I know have a bootable base installation of Debian. I actually ran through the install twice, once to familiarise myself with how it all worked, and then a second time for the real installation. The network card was automatically recognised so installing over the network was pretty painless. The choice to use an ext3 partition was given in the installer so no problems there either. I ended up with a 400MB swap partition and the rest of the 30Gb disk as a single partition. I didn't create a partition for the Suspend on Disk feature because there wasn't one there to begin with. If it doesn't work, I'll just rebuild the system.
I've not investigated the system too deeply yet to work out which devices
have been recognised and which haven't but I've noticed that:
dselect isn't exactly a user
friendly tool.Probably try and install GNOME this evening.
Some package management stuff to surf:
There's a Debian Planet
apparently.
1st July 2002
Following advice from Eric van der Vlist and Edd Dumbill, I think I'll
just use one big partition for my Debian installation. It looks like it'll
be more flexible.
Edd also recommended that I use the ext3 filesystem. Apparently I can change to this after installation by following the ext3 file system mini-HOWTO . I notice that the bf2.4 flavour of install has ext3 support built-in, so maybe I'll have an option to use this when I create the file system? We'll see. Planning to do the actual install tonight if I get time.
A few driver pointers, in case I get problems:
29th June 2002
Took most of the day off, only relevant progress was to make a network install CD of Debian 3.0 , using the bootbf2.4.iso image from this page . Edd Dumbill recommended using Debian 3.0 (woody) because it's on the verge of coming the stable version. I chose the bf2.4 flavour because of it's support for more USB hardware and network drivers. A quick test boot proved the CD worked OK.
Backed up the rest of my files.
Although I've installed Linux before, that was a Red Hat distro on completely different hardware. So I'm going to take this fairly steadily and start off in RTFM mode. The F'ing M that I'm R'ing is the Debian 2.2 Installation Manual . This page is intended to accumulate copious useful notes and pointers, probably interspersed with a smattering of joy and pain.
My laptop specs in overview , and detail (PDF). Need to check these against the Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO . I also need to check my list of peripherals which include a Canon digital camcorder, scanner, web cam, Rio MP3 player which are all USB devices apart from the camcorder which is obviously firewire. The laptop has a detacheable MP3 player/portable 64MB hard drive which I'm hoping will work OK too.
Other hardware related HOWTO docs , including this one for laptops . More laptop relevant documentation .
Hmm. I started working through the laptop specs and checking the compatibility guide, but then I realised that there will be other laptops out there with similar components which are probably running Linux just fine. Turns out that the Higrade laptops have similar specs to some Asus machines, which have some Linux documentation for them . That'll save some time.
A bit of digging later and I discover that this laptop has identical specs . Although there's not a specific entry for this model in the Linux on Laptops docs. However the M1000 has similar specs, and there's some docs for that, see also this doc on the P6300 , and it seems that the 8400 works without too much problem on Debian. However it looks like I might have some problems with the modem, and I may need a separate partition to enable the Suspend to Disk feature. Just found some notes by someone running FreeBSD on an Asus T9400 . More modem issues, but also power management.
All this is convincing me that it's worth progressing and investing the time to do the install. However I really want to get the modem, and power management working properly -- a laptop is pretty useless without these. I think if I ended up not being able to use the laptop properly I'll just end up going back to Windows XP whatever it's faults. I need to work out the modem chipset and take a closer look at Linmodems.org .
Over at Linux USB I see there is "experimental" support for my USB Radio, the Rio, and my Logictech Quickcam. Have to read more about this later. Looks like I need a 2.4 kernel. I'm assuming thats part of Debian 2.2r6. I've built custom kernels in the past though, so it's not a particularly scary prospect to do it again.
Another few links to come back to later:
The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
has some good information about the filesystems, including their purpose
and requirements. Should probably skim through it at least.