D R A F T

A Newbie’s Guide to Debian Linux

T. R. ShemanskeMay 9, 2002

This document is really just a small supplement to very good installation guides forDebian Linux such as

http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/installmanualhttp://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/quick-reference/index.en.html

1 Partitioning your disk

There are many thoughts on the matter, and to some extent the decisions you make dependupon how many users will have accounts on your machine, and to what degree you wantthe rest of the world to have access to parts of your machine. You need at least a root(

) partition and a swap partition, though I would strongly recommend at least a separate

/home

partition. The reason for this is that in the event you need to reinstall the operatingsystem (meltdown, whim, whatever), you will no doubt reformat the root partition. With aseparate home partition, you will leave untouched all your personal ﬁles.

•

The swap partition is your “virtual memory”. If you have the space, make it twice thenumber of MB of RAM you have, but no more than 2048M is usually necessary. Youcan have multiple swap partitions if you do huge number crunching activities.

•

You need a root partition. If you are cavalier, this can be the only partition youcreate, though I would recommend against it. Other partitions that you might createare

/usr, /var, /home

. All of the public software you install goes into

/usr

. Itshould therefore be a sizeable partition with respect to the others (5G minimum). Oneadvantage to making

/usr

its own partition is that you may want to mount it read only(I don’t, but paranoid sysadmins do).

/var

holds things like print and mail spools,system logs, and TEX fonts created by Metafont as well as postscript fonts, and itis also the temporary repository for all Debian packages when downloading from theDebian mirror. Thus at times there is a large demand for space, while at other times itis underutilized. It needs read/write permissions in general. It should be at least 1G.Then comes

/home

which contains the home directories of all users who have accountson your machine. For most setups in which the Linux box is not going to have lots of users, the following might be reasonable.1

D R A F T

Note your root partition will contain many important directories/mount points in-cluding:

/etc

(where all the conﬁg ﬁles are kept),

/bin

(some system binaries),

/boot

(kernels and system maps),

/lib

(among other things all the modules for eachkernel),

/root

(root’s home directory),

/sbin

(more sensitive sysadmin binaries),

/tmp

(globally writable temp space).For a 10G drive:

–

swap

: 1G

–

: 1G

–

/usr

: 4G

–

/var

: 1G

–

/home

: 3GFor a 40G drive with only a few users:

–

swap

: 2G (or multiple 2G partitions)

–

: 2G

–

/usr

: 15G

–

/var

: 5G

–

/home

: 15GIf you have lots of users (and user ﬁles), you may want to put

/usr

at 10G and increase

/home

accordingly.

2 Setting up the Network (Choate House Example):

The first thing you need to access is whether you need a fixed IP address, or can get bywith a dynamically assigned IP address. In general, you should try to use a dynamic addressunless you are providing services: running various servers (e.g. web. print, mail, etc) wherea fixed address is important to clients.If your mail is delivered to another machine (BlitzMail or the department mail server),you don’t need a fixed IP address. You should not need to run your own print server (thattoo routes through the department), and unless you want to run your own web site and notuse the department pages, you don’t need a web server. So most workstations can get by just fine with a dynamic IP address. However, if you really need one, you apply for one byfilling out the form at

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~network/hostmaster.html

If you are using a dynamic IP address the networking information will be setup automat-ically by the linux installer program. If you are setting up a ﬁxed IP, you will need a nameand some networking information. Once you decide on a name, ﬁll out the form mentionedabove, and you will be given the following type of information:

•

IP address: 129.170.147.xxx2

D R A F T

•

Netmask: 255.255.255.0

•

Network address: 129.170.147.0

•

Broadcast address: 129.170.147.255

•

Gateway address: 129.170.147.1In addition, you need the Domain Name server addresses: 129.170.16.4 and 129.170.17.4

3 LILO

To be able to boot multiple operating systems, you need a loader which will load the desiredoperating system. LILO (LInux LOader) works well. Below is a typical

lilo.conf

ﬁlewhich I have annotated for some clarity. The reasons for having multiple Linux entries arementioned below in the section on kernel building.

# /etc/lilo.conf - See: ‘lilo(8)’ and ‘lilo.conf(5)’,# --------------- ‘install-mbr(8)’, ‘/usr/share/doc/lilo/’,# and ‘/usr/share/doc/mbr/’.# +---------------------------------------------------------------+# | !! Reminder !! |# | |# | Don’t forget to run ‘lilo’ after you make changes to this |# | conffile, ‘/boot/bootmess.txt’, or install a new kernel. The |# | computer will most likely fail to boot if a kernel-image |# | post-install script or you don’t remember to run ‘lilo’. |# | |# +---------------------------------------------------------------+# Enable map compaction:# Tries to merge read requests for adjacent sectors into a single# read request. This drastically reduces load time and keeps the# map smaller. Using ‘compact’ is especially recommended when# booting from a floppy disk. It is disabled here by default# because it doesn’t always work.## compact# Support LBA for large hard disks.#lba32