Building a Debian Squeeze System - Part 1

My Daughter's computer died a few days ago.  It was about 5 years old, so we replaced it with one that was more suitable to her current needs, but then we were left with what was basically a good machine.  It was easily repairable, needing only a new Hard Disk drive, and co-incidentally, a friend of ours needed a machine that was an improvement on what she had.

From there was born the idea of resurrecting our dead machine.  It was a Pentium 4 2.8 with a Gigabyte of memory, nVidia 5200 video, Floppy disk, Firewire and two DVD R/W drives. 

First step was to buy a new sata hard disk.  500Gig for $75 seemed pretty cheap.  After that was installed, I booted the machine with "Parted Magic" from CD and partitioned and formatted the drive to a 40 gig "root" partition, a 4 gig swap and the remainder to "home".  Parted Magic is just a great utility distribution with some very useful tools and easy to use.

Next, I booted up with Debian's "netinstall" cd for the "testing" branch, "Squeeze".  The installation procedure is identical to Lenny, and an excellent "how-to" for installing Debian Lenny is here - http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-debian-lenny .  In my case, the end result was booting to the command line, rather than the Gnome Display Manager (although boot time was amazingly fast).  Easily dealt with though - after logging in, just type "startx" and you are away.

However .....

There is a better way if you want to boot into a graphical environment (remembering that there are several ways to fix this). 

• Boot as normal and log in as the normal user  ( $ ).
• Type "su" at the "$" prompt to become the superuser ( # ) and give the root password when asked for it.
• Type "aptitude install gdm" at the # prompt - a number of packages will now be downloaded and installed on your system.
• Type "reboot" at the # prompt again.
  

You'll now boot into a graphical display.

The above example shows how the Debian tools turn what could be a painful experience into only a few seconds typing.  The Debian package management system and its associated "dpkg", "apt" and "aptitude" toolsets really make administration of this sytem easy.  An alternative to "aptitude" above, would have been "apt-get", which is now discouraged and which I am trying to get out of the habit of using.  Aptitude is superior in that it keeps track of all associated package dependencies when your target package is removed from your system, apt-get only tracks the primary package, not the dependencies.

So, I now had the basic "Squeeze" install.

More later