Notes on Installing Debian GNU/Linux 1.3 on tph's

ATTENTION: Since 98/7/30 our mirror contains Debian Linux 2.0! The information below is partially obsolete. IMPORTANT: Do not use dselect to upgrade from 1.3 to 2.0!! Follow the upgrade information available at the Debian homepage. From the various options described therein I'd recommend using autoup.sh. Read the corresponding README!

These are additional notes for Installing Debian GNU/Linux 1.3 at a tphXX.tuwien.ac.at (compiled by Toni Rebhan).
You may also find it useful to see Max's log file of a full Debian installation.

Ad: Configure the Device Drivers

You need the device drivers for your network card. Some cards cannot be configured automatically when the device driver is loaded as a module, so you may need to know the IO-address and the IRQ beforehand.

You also need the module for the nfs file system.

Ad: Configure the Network

What is the name of your computer?: tphXX, and is your system connected to a network?: Yes.

Your host name: tphXX
Your domain name: tuwien.ac.at
Your computer's IP address: 128.130.48.120+XX
The netmask to use with your network: 255.255.255.128
The broadcast address to use on your network: 128.130.48.255
The IP address of the default gateway system you should route to, if your network has a gateway: Yes: 128.130.48.129
The system on your network that you should use as a DNS (Domain Name Service) server: 128.130.2.3 128.130.3.131 (no commas!)
The type of your network: Ethernet and whether you use a PCMCIA adapter. (If you choose to configure a PCMCIA network adapter it won't work yet. You have to get and install the pcmcia-cs package first.)

You can change them once the system has been installed, if necessary, by editing /etc/init.d/network .

The first user

After having set the root password, you are asked to enter a user name for the first user on the new system. If you want to follow the scheme of UIDs and GIDs of the servers, choose kreuzer and add yourself only later (see below).

Ad: dselect

RTFM: Read the f... manual!

Recommendations:

Access method: nfs (you may wish to make sure that our mirror looks sound, in particular there should be no file with the name Archive-Maintenance-in-Progress !)
- Server: tph16.tuwien.ac.at
- Path: /home/ftp/pub
- Directory: [/debian]
- Local: /debian-non-US/stable/binary
(Broken pipe messages appear to be harmless at this point)
Select: exit the first help screen by space. Return starts the dependency check procedure.
If this is the first run, just accept what is preselected (or at most remove nonessential packages if disk space is very small).
Install: You have to answer certain questions.
Answers to the more important ones:
- gpm: typical configuration is -m /dev/ttyS0 -t ms, which requires to change the default setting of type from bare to ms.
- smail: accept default settings (in particular: default=(1) for the general setup saying that you are directly connected via SMTP);
  smarthost: mr.tuwien.ac.at, to be consulted only as fallback = default(2)
- xntp3: NTP server 128.130.2.3
  run ntpdate every time xntpd starts? y
- news servers: news.tuwien.ac.at
- ssh: if you do not want to disable conventional rlogin, rsh, rcp and xon say no when asked (see also below)
If something scrolls by too quickly, stop scrolling by CTRL-S, continue by CTRL-Q.
Select again: when having installed successfully a minimal system, you can change to another machine and continue to work remotely, which is more convenient when using X-windows. However, what cannot be done this way is to use the graphical installation facility coming with XFree. You have to skip the generation of the XF86Config file then and do /usr/sbin/xbase-configure later from the console (unless you can use an existing XF86Config file).
You now have to select from the rest of some thousand packages. If you do not want to go through them and read all the descriptions and then have to make up your mind, you can clone an existing Debian system (say tphYY) by doing
1. on the tphYY: dpkg --get-selections > Selections.tphYY
2. move the file Selections.tphYY to the tphXX
3. on the tphXX: dpkg --set-selections < Selections.tphYY
before restarting dselect.
For a small system I can recommend cloning the tph62, for a generous installation the tph17 (download Selections.tph17 or Selections.tph62). Don't install too much! You can always install more later if the need arises.
You should still go through the select dialog, dependency check, etc., because the versions of some packages will have changed, and so may some dependencies. Also you may have to select a different X-server (check your graphics card)!
Install again:
XFree: If you are on the console you can go on with setting up XFree, which is done now with a graphical interface. You will need to know your graphics card and the monitor settings. If you need to find out about the graphics card, you can run /usr/bin/X11/SuperProbe from a console terminal. For the monitor, you need to know the range of horizontal and vertical frequencies, to be entered in the Monitor section (don't forget to press return). Notice that you should press the 'Done' button in the graphical XFree installation only when you are done with all of the sections!
Very likely you will encounter the following feature/bug of dselect:
Install may end with error messages because certain packages have not yet been installed on which others depend. Rerunning install often solves this problem, but if the missing packages are in 'contrib' or 'non-free', it won't, for dselect stops before processing the latter if there are errors. Either install the missing packages by hand (i.e. dpkg -i missing_package.deb) or temporarily remove the broken packages from the select list, rerun install, reselect them, and again run install.

Finetuning

Finetuning is best done manually, using 'dpkg' instead of 'dselect' to install or remove particular packages (do 'dpkg --help' for summary of options). To access our Debian mirror, do mount -t nfs tph16:/home/ftp/pub /mnt (as root of course).

Netscape: At present (Debian-1.3.1), the stable distribution offers only installation facilities to install netscape-3.01. This version is however said to have certain security holes, which might be exploited by vicious http-servers. There is a new version 3.04, which can be installed if you rename the netscape source files to 3.01. You can do this while fetching them from the goodie server by
```
ftp gd
  lcd /tmp
  cd /infosys/browsers/netscape/pub/navigator/3.04/shipping/english/unix/linux12/navigator_complete
  get netscape-v304-export.x86-unknown-linux-elf.tar.gz netscape-v301-export.x86-unknown-linux-elf.tar.gz
quit
```
before (re)running dselect. (If you prefer navigator-gold, you have to substitute navigator_complete by navigator_gold_complete in the above.)
If instead you want to install version 4 of netscape, which comes under the name Communicator, do the following (assuming that tph16:/home/ftp/pub is mounted on /mnt) as root
```
ftp gd
  lcd /tmp
  cd cd /infosys/browsers/netscape/pub/communicator/4.04/shipping/english/unix/linux20/professional_edition
  get communicator-v404-export.x86-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz
quit
dpkg -i --force-depends /mnt/debian_local/netscape4*.deb
```
However, I have had some problems with the Communicator, so I'm using 3.04 at the moment.
Plugins: Instead of purchasing commercial plug-in's as Netscape expects you to do to take advantage of this newest unnecessary development, you may install plugger, which allows you to use external programs like xanim instead. Simply get plugger-2.2-linux-elf.so,
mkdir /usr/local/lib/netscape/plugins
and move it there.
Bash: The stable distribution has bash version 2.0, which is not downward compatible to bash 1.14 that everybody used hitherto. In particular netscape runs into problems with helper applications which however are avoided with bash 2.0.1. The latter is available at present only in the unstable distribution and so nothing for the feeble-minded. Either get the source code and compile yourself (or ask Herbert Balasin), or install the old bash through
```
dpkg -i /mnt/debian_local/bash_1.14.7-2.deb
```
If you want to prevent dselect from automatically updating bash the next time you run dselect, put bash on hold there (with '=').
Kernel: If you want or need to recompile the kernel, you need to have installed the package kernel-source-2.0.29 or -2.0.30. (Debian 1.3 is generally based on the former, so this is a safe bet, but so far we had no problems with the latter, which should be slightly faster in networking.)
If you have a new 3com EtherLink XL network card you may need to get a new driver from ftp://tph48.tuwien.ac.at/pub/3c59x.c and install it in /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/. (This should become unnecessary when newer kernel sources become available. They are by now, see here.)
Follow the instructions in /usr/src/linux/README, starting with the chapter "CONFIGURING the kernel" therein. Under X-Windows use make xconfig; otherwise make menuconfig is the method of choice. For xconfig you need to have tk-dev installed (as suggested by dselect). Also, root must be allowed to open windows on your X session by xhost +localhost, if X hasn't been started by root herself.
Save your configuration settings in a separate file somewhere for future use before exiting the configuration!
A short summary of what you have to do all in all:
```
cd /usr/src/linux
make mrproper
make xconfig
make dep; make clean
make zImage
make modules; make modules_install
make zlilo

or, if you want to have more control over LILO, instead of make zlilo, e.g.:
mv /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/zImage /boot/vmlinuz-you_name_it
mv /usr/src/linux/System.map /boot/System.map-you_name_it
mv /vmlinuz /vmlinuz.old
mv /System.map /System.map.old
ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-you_name_it /vmlinuz
ln -s /boot/System.map-you_name_it /System.map
/sbin/lilo (after adjusting /etc/lilo.conf)
```
Note that if you know that somebody has already produced a custom kernel for a machine with hardware compatible with yours, you can just take over his kernel and install it in /boot, make the necessary links, run lilo, and enjoy.
In order to produce a bootable floppy, just do cp /vmlinuz /dev/fd0 on a newly formatted floppy. It is also a good idea to edit /etc/lilo.conf so that the older kernel image(s) can be booted, too. (RTFM)
Some special kernel-related issues:
- According to the Linux-Handbuch, the experimental feature PCI bridge is a rather stable and recommendable thing to improve system performance.
- If you have more than 64 M RAM, you need to specify the amount of RAM by including a line like append="mem=128M" in /etc/lilo.conf after label=.....
- For multiprocessor computers you have to edit /usr/src/linux/Makefile to include SMP = 1 before compiling the kernel. You should also remove the setserial package through dpkg --purge setserial, because it might cause trouble with multiprocessors.

Further recommended adjustments

In particular if you want to be able to mount parts of your file system on one of our servers, it would be advantageous to have the same UIDs and GIDs both locally and remotely. Therefore add new users by
```
adduser --uid NNNN username
```
where NNNN is the UID given to username on the tph16.
UIDs begin at 1000 in Debian. In order that you do not have to remap UIDs later, use kreuzer as the first user you add when installing the base system.
In Debian, the GID of users equals their UID. This can be used to make a subset of your files accessible by other users, either by adding their usernames (separated by commas) in your /etc/group entry or by installing a group password by passwd -g yourgroup. Others can temporarily join your group by doing sg yourgroup (the analogue of su; likewise it is left by exit).
Instead of making executables like mtools, cdtools, etc. SUID root, add the users which should be able to access the floppy or the CD to the group floppy or cdrom.
Install MErtl's printcap
In order to allow other machines to open windows in your X session you need to produce a file /etc/X0.hosts which lists their names or IP numbers, one per line. IP numbers are to be preferred, because you won't depend on the name servers.
I recommend installing ssh (SECURE SHELL) which can be found in tph16:/home/ftp/pub/debian-non-US. This is a fully compatible replacement of the r-utilities which allow trusted logins.
If you have not yet installed it in a dselect session, after mounting tph16:/home/ftp/pub do dpkg -i /mnt/debian-non-US/stable/binary/ssh* (make sure that you have installed the packages gmp and zlib1). You are then asked whether you want to remove the insecure r-utilities in favour of the secure replacements. Say no so that others can continue to use rsh until each user has switched to ssh. You can disable conventional rsh, rlogin and rexec later by calling update-inetd --disable login,shell,exec (and re-enable analogously).
In order to use ssh the same way as rsh with .rhosts files, each user has to generate a pair of keys and distribute the public key as described in Getting started with SSH. Even if you do not set up individual cryptocraphic keys, you can use ssh or slogin! You then have to provide login passwords even though you may have a .rhosts file on the host machine. But you will have a secure, encypted connection where nothing is sent over the net in the clear. Therefore whenever possible use ssh or scp in place of telnet and non-anonymous ftp!

Anton Rebhan <rebhana@tph.tuwien.ac.at>
Page last modified: July 31, 1998