[Tfug] Back to Debian again - Now What?

[Harry McGregor]

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.

Ok.

> 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.

Sounds good, learning is good, and learning multiple platforms and
multiple flavors or distrubtions of platforms is also very good.

> 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.

Sounds like a very good idea.

> 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.

Remember, you can always hide the commands, and mask over them,  The
important thing from a systems administration point of view is to know the
commands themselves, so that you can fix things when the gui is not
available, does not work, etc.

For the average "user" of a GNU/Linux system, they won't have much of a
need to know the commands.  You can setup the floppy with mfloppy, or
automount/unmount, and it should be useable either through kde or
gnome/gnome2.

> Harry, you were right there was a bug in my Debian
> Network Installation CD as all references in
> /etc/apt/sources.list were to 'stable' rather than to
> 'testing'. I edited the file with your suggested
> changes and it installed much more smoothly.

Great.

> 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.

That is the real advantage of having both systems running, you can look
into the configs that redhat autogenerated, begin to understand them, and
migrate the configuration to debian.  Also you can really really customize
the system to your liking.

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

This is probably best for now, once you have a display manager (gdm or
kdm) running, with Xwindows, you can set the system up to have a button to
click and shutdown.  This is fine on a workstation, generaly a bad idea on
a server.

> 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

Sounds like /floppy does not exhist on the system, go ahead and try "mkdir
/floppy" also you might have to change the command to "mount /dev/fd0
/floppy -t vfat"

> Windows I will try it again so I can print out lspci
> 3.  I downloaded and installed vim with
>    #apt-get install vim
>        What else would you suggest I get?

Probably for the printing, I would suggest lprng, we might need a few
other packages.  Basicaly the idea behind apt-get is to install packages
as you need them, not as you think you _might_ need them, in a few months.

knowing some of the stuff you are doing, I would probably recomend
installing apache (apt-get install apache), also traceroute can be useful.

> 4.  How do I set up my Lexmark Z22 as my default
> printer?
> 5.  How do I get into a GUI environment?

Probably the simplest, that should work (though not always 100% of the
time), would be to go into "tasksel" and select "X windows system" and
"desktop environment" and then go to "finish" (ie "f"), that should
install and setup Xwindows, with both KDE2 and Gnome as possible desktop
environmenets.

> Appreciate all of your help.

Your welcome, and please if you are running into "major" problems, bring
the system down to a sunday meeting (next meeting is July 13th).

			Harry

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--
Harry McGregor, CEO, Co-Founder
Hmcgregor@osef.org, (520) 661-7875 (CELL)
Open Source Education Foundation, http://www.osef.org