Linux distributions > Debian >

(on Wikipedia)
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=Debian
https://www.debian.org/

• 2021-02-19 - 9.13 on Windows 10 on Windows Subsystem for Linux

  • I've been using it for a while without paying attention to any upgrades.

• 2020-06-05 -- Switched to Devuan beowulf_3.0.0_amd64 within VirtualBox on Windows 10

  • I still use 2019-06-02 - 9.9.0-i386-xfce-CD-1 within VirtualBox on Windows 10
• 2019-10-30 - 10.1.0-amd64-xfce-CD-1 within VirtualBox on Windows 10
• 2019-06-02 - 9.9.0-i386-xfce-CD-1 within VirtualBox on Windows 10
• 2018-10-10 - (version not recorded) on Windows 10 on Windows Subsystem for Linux
• 2018-04-09 - debian-live-9.4.0-i386-cinnamon (stretch)
• 2017-08-27
• 2017-07-24 - debian-live-9.1.0-i386-mate (I think)
• 2017-08-20 - I don't have any more recent notes that I've found offhand, and I've been using Debian happily for some time.

• 2005-06-26 - netinst i386 v3.1r0a

  • Trying a stable network install from a minimal cd (debian-31r0a-i386-netinst.iso) after having too many issues with PCLinuxOS (not) running in VMWare.
• 2003-09-06 - Debian, 4
• (date not recorded) - Debian, 3

• Debian, 2

2019-06-02 - 9.9.0-i386-xfce-CD-1 ∞

I couldn't get the guest additions CD working for Devuan 2.0 (Ascii).

Trying it with VirtualBox 6.0.8.

2018-04-09 - debian-live-9.4.0-i386-cinnamon (stretch) ∞

Notes ∞

• Their website is such shit that I had to google to find what I wanted: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/i386/bt-hybrid/

• I went through the following hell just to explore a solution to a Devuan 1.0.0 avconv crash (Devuan).

  • I never did get to test libav (or what I might have learned is FFmpeg as the default in Debian).

Preparation attempt ∞

• I made an attempt to install with MultiBootUSB but it didn't work and I had to use
• The LiveCD has no installer?

• GUI install can't find "the CD".

  • So I went hunting to figure out how to solve this. I'm faced with the fact that the internet is now old, and search results will be ancient and cannot be properly constrained by date or Debian version number. I wonder if Google or some other search engine has some sort of "sort (or group) by date" functionality.

An attempt to solve that:

• alt-F2

\mkdir  /media/usb
# This would not work..
\mount -t vfat  /dev/sdc1  /media/usb
\mount -o loop  path/foo.iso  /cdrom

• alt-F1

• Say "no" to search, then "Detect and mount..."

I got..

mount: mounting /dev/sdc1 on /media/usb failed: Invalid argument

• No, all arguments are valid. Fucking Linux.
• I tried a different USB port, no luck.

• I followed the instructions from multibootusb issue #85, user comment with adjustments to use 9.4.0-i386 (stretch).

find /mnt/multibootusb/debian-7.8.0-amd64-netinst/ -name vmlinuz -exec sudo cp vmlinuz {} \;
find /mnt/multibootusb/debian-7.8.0-amd64-netinst/ -name initrd.gz -exec sudo cp initrd.gz {} \;

• I wondered if I could avoid the netinstall and used the liveCD/installer that I already had. I didn't bother trying.

--

Using the modified netinst

• Nope, still can't find the ISO.
• As I had put the ISO in a subdirectory, I tried again after putting it in the root of the multibootusb USB stick. No luck.

• I can't manually mount.

--

Since the above, and whatever other variations I might have tried, didn't work, I figured I'd just have to use a whole USB stick. However I didn't know how to prepare a USB stick and their website is such shit that I ended up just trying a dd, as with:

\dd  if=whatever.iso  of=/dev/sdx  bs=5M

.. If I had no idea what to do, I'd be pretty fucked by this point. Debian's website, documentation and wiki are a complete mess.

dd worked, so this is a hybrid ISO. I had to think back to previous experiments to remember any of this terminology.

--

Using the new usb stick worked.

• #4 SCSI 4, 254.8 MB

  • /boot (boot), ext4, (noatime, nodiratime) + erased

• #5 of SCSI 4 (sda)

  • use as physical LVM

--

• Finish
• no
• Wait, how the fuck do I re-use LVM/encryption?
• fuck it..

• guided partitioning

  • use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM
  • all files in one partition
• cancel the overwrite

• using the assigned LV names.. it gave me some gobbledygook.. whatever.. I don't remember any of this stuff.

--

• I spent quite some time making the base applications do the Right Thing. Everything was possible, except

  • alt-escape for pushing the currently-used window to the back.
    -- This was enough to make me reconsider using Openbox.
  • alt-tab for changing windows on the current monitor only.
    -- I never got this working, and switched back to Openbox.
  • Display taskbar entries for the current monitor.
    -- I never even explored this, because a proper alt-tab fix was never discovered.

alt-tab for changing windows on the current monitor only.

• install dconf-editor
• org gnome desktop wm keybindings
• switch-applications to []
• The fuck.. nothing is respected; everything reverts.. fuck this.
• gsettings list-keys org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings
• trying to set anything gives "... foo ... The connection is closed"

• /bin/su -

-

• switch-applications => switch-windows
• when does this take effect?

• tried restarting dbus and it fubared everything, forcing a reboot via SysRq-reisub

-

• /etc/init.d/dbus reload

• While it does stuff, keybinding changes aren't respected.

-

• c-a-down kinda helps.

-

• fuck me, a lot more research and nothing works. This is enough to switch back to Openbox.

• Ungh, I can't remember how to switch..

  • .xinitrc works, kinda
  • need to restart, then pick openbox from the dropdown box at the top-right.

-

Attempting to restore from backup, but god damned disk access is slow.

• Fuck me, something is very wrong

  • Partitioning?
  • Partition Alignment?

--

• Re-install from scratch
• Manually create an LV
• Manually create encryption
• Fuckwit installer can't specify a / mountpoint
• Maybe I should the LiveUSB to use GParted?
• Why isn't gparted installed by default?
• Back debian liveUSB

• apt update begged for the CDROM

  • There was no Links or Lynx to search the internet for answers.
  • I was able to find /etc/apt/sources.list and comment-out the CDROM reference.
• apt update ; apt install gparted hangs at 72%. I control-c then tried with apt-get to uninstall and then reinstall.

• GParted and choose to align to cylinder

  • why isn't this the default?

-

• Can't set up LVM and then encrypt? The fuck? Reboot.
• Tried only encrypted, but the LVM was already mounted!
• Deleted the LVM, set up only encryption
• Whines about a swap partition
• Can't set up a swap partition, reboot

• Wait, fuck, I can't use this installer to partition. Nevermind.. rebooting and not reinstalling.

--

Rebooted into the already-installed system.

• Black screen for a long time on bootup.
• Specify cinnamon on the login screen. (and not openbox this time)
• very slow login

• Disk access is still shit.

--

FUCK THIS, I'm going back to Devuan. See Devuan.

--

• TODO - Is it possible to install Debian without PulseAudio?

2017-08-27 ∞

An apt-get upgrade gave me bug 787231 and I had to make /var/tmp myself. I don't know where it went.

For what it's worth: I didn't record uname -a before fixing this, but now it is:

Linux 1A 3.16.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.16.43-2+deb8u2 (2017-06-26) i686 GNU/Linux

2017-07-24 - debian-live-9.1.0-i386-mate (I think) ∞

These notes might be a bit disjointed since I misplaced their paper notes for almost a month.

• Graphical install
• Detect network hardware is very slow! Blue Yeti curse?

• Only allows the setup of one new user

Partition disks > Manual

• I don't understand the GUI installer for an existing LVM/crypt

  • I ended up destroying things. Good thing I make backups.
  • apt-get update ; lvm/cryptsetup

• USB2, tab, copy2ram remove USB stick

  • copy2ram is n/a

• At the installer, can move the stick right away.

  • False, it's not detected and freezes.
• Freezes until I plug in / unplug my cursed Blue Yeti.

• Encrypted partition - separate /home

  • TODO - resize for an unencrypted one.
• GRUB installation took a long time...

• The post-GRUB install finalization was fucking slow...

--

First boot

• Nice GRUB menu, proper resolution.

Failed to find cpu0 device node

then freezes

• Slapped numlock to continue.. but I think it just took time
• Shit bootup resolution until password unlock...
• Black screen for a long while
• Godawfully slow login after user/pass
• user not in sudoers by default...
• root login doesn't work

• power button powers off

--

• recovery mode doesn't freezes on cpu0, on...

ohci-pci 0000:00 B.1: OHCI PCI host controller
                      new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 8
                      irq 18, io memo 0xfe02a000

• Wait, I had another drive powered on. Straight boot - go es to a black screen recovery mode.. the same.

• Giving up, going to Devuan

2003-09-06 - Debian, 4 ∞

I decided to take another look at the Debian homepage. I nabbed jigdo and was ready to go. I had to mull around to figure out where the .jigdo files could be downloaded from, and then I was faced with "what do I get?" I was faced with a number of ISOs. Lacking documentation on what ISOs I should download (nothing in the download pages, nothing in the install guide) I gave up. If basic instructions are lacking, why should I go any further?

Update:

Again, this is for the terminally curious, as there's a lot of reading ahead.

Debian hasn't met my expectations. I've got a number of fatal problems with it, which I'm not going to even bother to muddle through. My reasoning is that if various defaults aren't what I desire, then this just isn't the distro for me.

Fatal problems:

• Cannot get 132x60 textmode to happen. While I understand the configuration of lilo, something somewhere forces a pretty 80x24 screen with that lovely penguin logo. On a related note, I have to switch between two consoles to get full use of scrolling. The penguin logo mucks with the framebuffer etc and is generally useless.

Booting the installer with linux video=vga:off did not remove the penguin from the initial install.

haven't yet tried LILO with

video=vga16:off vga=ask

• apt-get appears to be broken for the way I'd expect to use it. After a few clean installs and what I'd consider to be average use of it, it breaks. While there are methods to hand-edit scripts.. again, if the defaults are to act like this, then I don't want to constantly swim upstream on the issue.

• Under a reasonably boring Slackware 8 install, I am able to, under X, rip a CD while encoding three WAVs to MP3 while backing up full partitions to another HDD, all while playing an MP3.. and still putter around without a hiccup. This is on my old Pentium Pro 200 and my Pentium II266.

  • Under Debian, I cannot do a partition to partition copy and still switch consoles and putter around a directory tree without noticing serious hiccups. Again, perhaps there is tweaking necessary to get things to go the way I want.. but again if the defaults can't do what I want, maybe I'm on the wrong distro.

• No sound support out of the box.

  • Slackware has a quick modprobe commandline to get my card to work. As I understand, I need to go with a kernel with sound support. Apparently the default doesn't have this.. strange. I'm sure I could do some reasonable research to get this to work easily enough though, but it bothers me.
• I'm told to look under /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/Soundblaster, but none of this documentation is installed. Meh..
• https://web.archive.org/web/20020802165413/http://www.tux.org:80/~tbr/sound-debian/
• https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/

• I appear to be having neighbor table overflow errors constantly, at random times.. even during bootup (e.g. the system log daemon starts up and this error is printed out). I was doing mass copies from one partition to another and I got these errors. Again, I wasn't doing much out of the ordinary, so I've no idea why this would happen. I don't believe I saw this on my first Debian installs.

Outstanding issues:

Some of these are easily fixed, I know. I figured I'd post these up for the curious.

• I got quick little warning messages during a mass install! This is bad.. I should be told after all of the installs happen.. when I am next prompted for action. If I leave the room during a mass install, there's no way I could read those messages.
• Unsure of .xinitrc equivalent.. how to set up X for individual users. RTFMable I'm sure.
• How do I set the default WM?
• Cannot apt-get install debconf-doc as mentioned in /usr/doc/debconf/README.Debian
• Debconf is mentioned during install, however i cannot find this command.
• How do I use tasksel with dpkg like my initial setup?

• To kill that X login thing after it's begun:

/etc/init.d/gdm stop

move /etc/rc2.d/*kdm /etc/rc2.d/*gdm /etc/rc2.d/*xdm so that that auto X thing won't happen.

This most likely will break apt-get though.. hmm.

• For some reason, Debian (and I'm positive it was Debian) mangled my CMOS and buggered up HDD detection. I was forced to do a full power cycle after install. This appears to be a strange interaction between either of the kernel or Debian's setup and my CMOS or some other wackyness. Since it's not a horrible problem and is obscure, I don't care much..
• Basic install of Debian shows that modprobe cannot find char-major-10-135 on reboot. Odd. I've seen this happen multiple times during the bootup of reasonably clean installs.

• Does not have more advanced tools during initial bootup. I cannot format a DOS ^[ 1 ] Was that FAT16? partition for example. It has nano-tiny? Apparently this initial setup was based around a very slim setup.

(date not recorded) - Debian, 3 ∞

2020-06-04 -- These look like notes from a copy-paste from somewhere else, source not recorded

• apt-get -f install usually does the trick, as long as you didn't slap the system around to the point of a pretty bad concussion..
• If you caused a minor concussion, then dpkg --configure -a is likely to be helpful.
• If your abuse caused a serious concussion, then dpkg --audit will likely be helpful.
• Of course, if you did something like rm -rf /var/lib/dpkg, all bets are off.
• If you want a 2.4.18 kernel, go into aptitude/dselect/whatever (aptitude is from apt), and search for "2.4.18," and you can select a kernel to install.
• If you want to install a particular kernel from source, and have it supported by the package management system (which is pretty valuable if you want to use nVidia video drivers), then install kernel-package, which can compile your favorite kernel source tree and generate a package to dpkg -i into place. That's the toughest option of the three, but not too hard, so long as you know to look at the documentation installed in /usr/share/doc/kernel-package
• You're probably loading a framebuffer module on boot. Personally I don't (ever) use the default distro kernel. Always roll my own from scratch 'n patch. (although with the addition of XFS to the kernel tree, I may not have to anymore)

• To set the default window manager, or set it as your default window manager in GNOME or KDE, or link it in /etc/alternatives as x-window-manager

-

It is much much safer to use:

update-alternatives --config x-window-manager

.. since sometimes multiple links have to stay matched.

tasksel with dpkg:

Most people would try running tasksel. You might have to install it first. tasksel is a good choice for people who don't want to tweak their systems. Whatever you do, avoid dselect! It's positively user hateful.

Debian, 2 ∞

Partitioning scheme:

hda:
1  p ext3  8    (/boot?)
3  p fat16 500
5  l ext3  500   /         rw,errors=remount-ro
6  l ext3  50    /var      rw?
7  l ext3  50    /home     rw?
8  l ext3  ~700  /tmp      rw?
9  l ext3  1000  /usr      rw?
10 l ext3  7000  /_archive rw,nosuid
11 l ext3  30000 /_mp3     rw,noexec,nosuid
2  p swap  200   (swap)

I don't have the security settings on me.. I think I mucked around briefly. Nothing special.

• 500MBs for / may not be enough later, but it's resonable for now.
• /usr shouldn't be nosuid, as some apps need it.

• /usr and /home could have been mixed in with /archive but I thought it would be cleaner to separate them.

  • I may run out of room with a 1GB /usr partition, but it's ok for now.

• /home partition was made solely to appease certain strange circumstances.

  • Under most circumstances I'll be symlinking out from that partition into another to provide more space where necessary.

• /var holds logs, some keep this small to force awareness of runaway problems.

  • Logs need to be rotated using a cron job.. I've been told that email and news goes here, which may be a bad thing, since I may need more space for news. Must confirm which apps use this space for news.

• must fix /_mp3 to use less inodes. Not really clear on why I should care.

Again, my own notes.. perhaps useless for other people.

• 'dpkg --configure -a' to attempt to reinstall partially installed apps
• dpkg --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/mozilla... .deb -- forcing a reinstall
• /var/lib/dpkg/info/ has scripts
• apt-get install menu for Debian's KDE/GNOME menus.
• apt-get cfs for transparent encryption

• RTFM

  • apt-cache
  • /usr/share/doc
• Fix aliases so they make sense (colour ls, rmuser=deluser). Unsure of how I'd edit defaults globally or per-user.
• Replace default shell with Zsh, look into control-left/control-right functionality.

• Find on-cd and on-system documentation, FAQs, etc..

Steps:

• Edit ~/.bashrc to implement colour ls, aliases etc.
• Edit XF86Config (apparently it's XF86Config-4 in Debian for v4)

• Fix the mouse.

  • Yes, I hammered at the various config screens during setup.
• Fix X11 video modes
• xf86config, then copy /etc/X11/XF86Config to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 so it's used by gdm etc.
• Edit /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf to can change the background etc.

• The numlock is on by default

  • I think this is a setting in LILO, but I must recheck)
  • www.geocrawler.com/mail/thread.php3?subject=easy+numlock+question&list=199
  • Fix setleds to set the current tty only.
  • numlockx for when I want to control the numlock if I use X, gdm/etc

#!/bin/sh
# file: /etc/init.d/setleds
INITTY=/dev/tty[1-6]

# for tty in $INITTY; do
/usr/bin/setleds -D +num < $tty

# done
#chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/setleds

# ~/.bashrc - or profile.. blah, wherever it goes.  Check my system.
# could:

• Manually install:

  • less
  • mc
  • XMMS

• /etc/modules - stuff to load at bootup.

Commands to know:

• modprobe, dmesg, lsmod, xf86config, tasksel, debconf, nano
• vi - try vim and vimtutor
• dpkg -l -- list currently installed packages.
• apt-cache search <keyword>

• apt-listchanges can be configured to email changelog entries on each package upgrade.

Note that if you need to "play god" over certain applications, you can always do apt-get source <application>, throw in your own modifications, and generate patches that you can apply to newer releases.

Last updated 2021-02-28 at 14:43:41