[Tfug] Back to Debian again - Now What?

[tfug@tfug.org]

On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Craig Smith wrote:

> I have reinstalled Debian in lieu of Red Hat. Although
> I liked the ease of installing Red Hat it seemed
> difficult to update, I am sure it just of not being
> familiar it. If I had my choice I would rather not pay
> anything even at first.

Its not cause you're not familiar. RPM-based systems are generally hell to
update. There's software like Red Carpet to ease the pain, but it doesn't
come close to apt's functionality.

>
> I have several spare hard drives all on removable
> racks so it is just a matter of easily swapping out
> hard drives and rebooting so I will also have a Red
> Hat system to play  with along with Debian and Windows
> 2000 (the only system I am familiar with at the
> moment). None of my three systems are dual bootable as
> I am a bit caution during the learning phase.

Dual booting's fine as long as you don't accidently delete the wrong
partitions :-)

>
> What I want to do is move Pima County into open source
> systems because they are generally FREE of cost
> (discounting learning time), secure, and maintainable.
>

Not to mention avoiding the worm/virus-of-the-day problem. Half of my time
working for the Pima County Department of Transportation was spent
patching systems against SirCam and CodeRed and whatever followed.

> IMHO the commands for Linux are esoteric for a MS
> Windows user and a bit overwhelming. Before I can
> convince anyone to go to Linux I have to become
> comfortable with it. I don't want to start flame wars,
> I just want information to do the job.

Man pages are your friends :-). Do a "man foo" to figure out what foo
does.

(snip)

> Red Hat automatically configured my floppy drive and
> let me boot into X-Windows(Gnome and/or KDE). It also
> semi-automatically set my default printer to my
> Lexmark Z22 obviously I am going have to do this
> manually in Debian. This is no problem as long as I
> can set things up properly to my liking.
>

Debian should have configured your floppy. If it didn't, then there's
something funky going on or you have a very uncommon system. X shouldn't
be too painful. Debconf should ask you for most of the info you'll need to
get it up while installing the packages.

> 1. To shutdown I use the command:
>    #shutdown now -h
>         Is this correct or is there a better way?

Well, I use shutdown -h now instead :-)

> 2. To mount my floppy drive I use the command
>    #mount /dev/fd0 /floppy/ -t vfat
>        Is this correct? I may have mistyped it but I
> got an error (directory not found??) when I get out of
> Windows I will try it again so I can print out lspci

Just "mount /floppy" should work. Debian puts in the proper entry in
/etc/fstab during the install.

> 3.  I downloaded and installed vim with
>    #apt-get install vim
>        What else would you suggest I get?

If you didn't install X while installing Debian, then you'll need to get
X as well. If you're gonna go with X 4, the package is named
xserver-xfree86. I suggest getting it through dselect, as it then suggests
a bunch of things to compliment that (such as a terminal, a window
manager, etc..)

> 4.  How do I set up my Lexmark Z22 as my default
> printer?

You could try configuring it with magicfilter, or once you got X and stuff
you can download other graphiky utils. I've never really had a need to set
up a printer (I usually print all my stuff from school), so I don't know
too much more about that in Debian. Magicfilter has worked the one time I
needed a printer, though.

> 5.  How do I get into a GUI environment?

Install X, then once you got it running get a window/desktop manager. For
KDE, if you select konqueror through dselect, it'll suggest the rest of
kde for you (quite a few packages). If you want gnome, select gnome-cc (I
think that's what the control center deb is called) and it'll suggest the
rest of gnome. I personally preffer Blackbox to either of them,

- Yan