4.17 Base Install
4.17.1 Language
Choose English, Australia, English (US) keyboard.
4.17.2 Networking
During an install DHCP will be attempted to obtain your network information from a DHCP server. This (usually) requires that you identify your host as a host that your DHCP server knows or relies on the DHCP server allocating the next available IP address. Do so just to see if there is a DHCP server available to you.
If a DHCP server is not available then you will be prompted for alternative options, including manually setting up the appropriate network information.
Generally you need the following, where some sample addresses are supplied:
IP 155.229.8.165
Netmask 255.255.255.192
Gateway 155.229.8.190
Domain togaware.com
DNS 183.44.72.1The information is recorded in /etc/network/interfaces and
/etc/resolv.conf. Later on edit /etc/resolv.conf to
add search togaware.com so that you can refer to your local
machines by their name, without fully specifying the domain.
Some useful commands for trouble shooting are:
# netstat -n
# ifconfig -a4.17.3 Partitions
Partitioning of hard drive(s) can be tricky for the new user. For a
new installation you will want to erase the entire disk, which is
usually the default option. The Debian Installer provides options to
partition your disk in a number of ways. It recommends a simple,
single partition, which is a good choice to start with, but choose an
option that matches your situation. Another good choice is to create
two partitions, one of say 10GB for / and the remainder for
/home. This way you can wipe out / and reinstall
GNU/Linux and still retain your /home files. Unless you know
what you are doing, stay with one of these simpler schemes, although a
fuller discussion of Disk Partitioning is included in
Chapter 62.
4.17.4 Reboot and User Accounts
Once the base system is installed you are asked to reboot the system. Remove the floppy disk and CD-ROM and reboot the machine. Keep the floppy in if this is how you plan to boot into Linux (otherwise you are probably using GRUB to boot directly into Linux).
You will be asked to set the time zone—choose GMT for a GNU/Linux only machine and NO GMT for dual boot machines.
Enter a password for the root account and create a user account. In general it is best to log in as a user then use the su command to set the user to be root as needed (e.g., to install packages or modify files in /etc).
4.17.5 Package Selections
You will be asked to install a collection of selected packages.
Generally I delay until I’ve got the system basically functioning, then use my own devices to update and install all the packages I want, and hence I skip this step. You can rerun this later with the tasksel command.
4.17.6 EMail: Setup Exim
The default email server for Debian is exim. This can be set up in one of several ways, depending on how you will access your email. The exim configurator will list the options.
Generally, for a networked machine (e.g., Athene) that is not acting as a mail server, but using a remote smarthost (SMTP server) to send email, yet still delivering email locally (which is obtained using fetchmail, for example, from an IMAP server) you will choose option 2.
The information you then supply is:
visible name: athens.togaware.com
other names: none
domain rely: none
network relay: none
smarthost: mailhost.togaware.com
root email sent to: kayon This means that mailhost.togaware.com is used for sending
email. Any email sent from Athene to an unqualified address
(i.e., no @) will have athens.togaware.com appended
to it and delivered locally.
Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2021 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
