Re: heres my noob install questions, smart people please help

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Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 21:09:56 -0600
To: debian-user <debian-user@lists.debian.org>

David Millet wrote:

>
> 1) are these instructions
> http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install the best for a noob
> like me or are there some better ones out there somewhere?

These instructions cover lots of different methods of installation and
lots of different situations. As a result, they are vague in spots. It
would be ideal if you could find instructions tailored to your hardware
and your desires for what you want to do with the box, but you're not
likely to find that. So I'd highly recommend you read these
instructions, and then google for two or three other documents that
cover Debian installation, just so you can compare concepts as one
author leaves out some detail that another author includes.

Even better, do an installation, use it for about thirty minutes, then
wipe it and do it again. Repeat about three times. Then, if you can
swing it, do the same thing on some different type of hardware, like a
Macintosh or a Sparc. Nothing beats experience.

> 2) i have 2 harddrives, hda and hdb, hda has win2000 on it, its divided
> into 3 fat32 partitions, hdb has an old install of mandrake on it, i
> want to put debian on hdb, is the filesystem manager on the install cds
> comprehensible enough to where i'll be able to format the partitions on
> hdb without messing up hda? all my important data is on hda, so if
> something happens to hda i'm screwed

If it's really important, make a backup first. Having said that, you
won't have any trouble. Probably.

> 3) i see that lilo is the default bootloader, i know that if i put the
> windows lines in lilo.conf and i run /sbin/lilo it should let me choose
> between booting into windows or linux when i restart, are there any
> hangups or problems i need to look out for? i have some experience
> editing the lilo.conf file with good success in mandrake...

It's been my experience that the installation program doesn't include
Windows in lilo.conf (that may have changed in more recent versions). So
you may have to add that back in manually after your reboot into Debian.
Also, if you upgrade kernels (the "default" on a Woody install is 2.2.x
I believe), you'll need to make the change in lilo.conf mentioned during
the upgrade, about adding "initrd=/initrd.img" into the kernel stanza.
(You can ignore the other tip for now, about editing kernel-img.conf -
that's just for convenience on subsequent kernel upgrades.) I also
believe that the default lilo.conf doesn't present you with the
prompt/menu; you'll have to uncomment the appropriate lines and re-run lilo.

> 4) once i get debian up and running, i want to set it up to where the
> second partition on hda, my win2000 fat32 drive, is mounted as my home
> directory as a user. in other words, i want one of my fat32 partitions
> mounted at /home/david/ after i create the david user account. can that
> be done?

It can be done, but I wouldn't. Instead, I'd create a directory
something like /home/david/SharedWithWin and mount the partition there.

-- 
Kent
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• Previous message: Debian User: "Re: kde under sid"
• In reply to: David Millet: "heres my noob install questions, smart people please help"
• Next in thread: Paul E Condon: "Re: heres my noob install questions, smart people please help"
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