DebianEtch-KDE
Installing Debian Etch Using The Etch-KDE Single CD
Summary
This article is intended for beginners and those looking for tips and tricks to install Debian in their systems.
Debian is one of the popular and free ( Libre ) distributions of GNU/Linux. Etch is the latest stable release and comes in multiple CD or DVD installations. However there is a single CD Etch-KDE distribution debian-40r1-i386-kde-CD-1.iso available that can be downloaded from the Debian mirrors. For the purpose of this installation, it was downloaded in Mumbai, India from a Taiwanese mirror using the following command.
wget -c url
The -c option allows you to continue broken downloads. The hardware used for installation was Pentium4 2.4 GHz., Intel original 845 GEBV2 motherboard, 256 MB DDR2 RAM, 80 GB IDE HDD.
Installation
After the cd iso is downloaded, burn it into a CD and boot your system with it. At the boot prompt, simply hit the enter key to select the default installation method.
Every stage in the installation process is accompanied by text details to help you make the right entries wherever required. When you come to the package installation part, it will ask you if you want to install packages from the CD or mirrors. If you have internet problems or have low download limits, choose the CD install. It will still look for security mirrors and download about 50 to 60 MB of security updates.
Post Install Setup
The distro is packed with KDE utilities but does not have Open Office or KOffice and no CUPS. It comes with Iceweasel which is a fork of Firefox.
During package installation, the CD option was selected so there were no internet package repositories in the /etc/apt/sources.lst file. Use Alt+F2 to open the Run Command dialog box and type konsole and hit enter. From now on the remaining installation will be done in this terminal window.
The sudo and vim packages are added using
apt-get install sudo vim
The packages are installed from the CD itself. To use the sudo command, first open a terminal and su - to open a root shell. Edit the /etc/sudoers file using nano /etc/sudoers. If you are comfortable with vim then use vi in place of nano.
Below the line
- User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
Add a similar line and replace root with your user_name. Save the file and exit. Exit from the root shell and now you can use the sudo command for further setup.