Tom wrote:

How's the Debian installer, assuming I go with the original instead of a derivative (i.e. Knoppix)?

Just to make sure I'm being clear about this: Running Knoppix's optional /usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall installation does result in a Debian system, as one would understand that term in all meaningful senses. So would running the Progeny Graphical Installer ISO image, either the downloadable or the retail-box version of Libranet, the retail-box Xandros Desktop OS installer, the plain-vanilla Official Debian installer, or various others.

The plain-vanilla Official Debian installer is designed to be fairly modular, to support installation from the widest possible range of installation sources (local CD, hard disk, NFS, http, ftp, Zip disk, etc.) and to work across all 11 supported CPU architectures. In order to support installation onto the widest possible range of target hardware, it eschews aggressive autoprobing of hardware: Instead, at a point early in the installer, you can pick appropriate drivers from lists of such things by category, at which point the installer attempts an insmod. If the insmod succeeds, then you must have guessed right (*grin*) and the device (/filesystem/etc.) immediately becomes visible to the installer. Also, it gets added to the /etc/modules that will be written to the target hard drive.

Later on in the installer, you are given a choice of either simple or advanced package selection. You're advised to go for the former, which gives you a choice of metapackages (package groups). The "advanced" branch takes you into the modestly infamous dselect program, which many of us have never warmed to and consider a human-engineering debacle.

In either case, the installer then takes a fairly significant amount of time retrieving needed packages, and then installing them, and then configuring them (in that order). The command-line processes invoked in background to carry out those steps (apt-get, dpkg -i, and dpkg --configure) are fairly verbose, so there's a lot of scrolling screen output. The "configure" step asks the admin questions for some of the packages (typically maybe around 1/4 of them), on the basis of which it constructs their configuration files. A typical example would be the questions for Exim, the default SMTP server, for which they ask you which of four general types of mail service you need (local-only delivery, full Internet host, handing off to smarthost, etc.), and a couple of other basic questions.

The imposition of a "configure" step is in contrast to installers such as RH's (or knx-hdinstall), which do bulk-copy of generic configurations to the target drive, rather than consulting the admin to build system-tailored ones. In exchange for spending a bit more time answering questions, you get a system that better fits what you need to do without post-installation work.

Other than those two points, I can't see a lot of difference between the plain-vanilla Debian installer and other ncurses-oriented console installers for other *ixes. People gripe about it, so maybe some of those who have particular problems with it will speak up.

Oh, a few other things: (1) If you start your installation using floppy disk images, you have your choice of several diverse floppy sets, some of which deliberately omit some categories of hardware drivers so that you can successfully install onto machines with problem components in those categories. (2) When installing from CD, provided that your BIOS supports Joliet alternate boot images (most do), you can pick alternate boot "flavours" including "bf2.4" (boot flavour 2.4), which causes installation using a 2.4.x kernel. Otherwise, installation uses a 2.2.x kernel. Regardless, you should "apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.*" after installation, where * is some suitable version number, CPU type, etc. Fire up aptitude or synaptic to see what precompiled images are available on the package mirror sites.

I originally selected Knoppix because:
[...]
- I can give out the CD to my students and they can have the same environment at home as they do in class.

Knoppix has distinctive eye-candy, but it's nonetheless fundamentally Debian. You could install Debian to the workstations using the plain-vanilla installer and give the students Knoppix disks, and they'll basically have the same thing in both places. That make sense?

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Tom wrote, concerning Red Hat:

- It seems kind of pokey on our hardware (p3-800, 128 MB RAM, 16 MB VRAM)
- Red Hat Network updates seemed like a good idea at first, but now they're beginning to drive me a bit nuts as I attempt to maintain multiple desktops.

Both problems can be addressed without leaving Red Hat. Go to [link|http://apt.freshrpms.net/|http://apt.freshrpms.net/] and pull down the apt tools and prototype sources.list file for your Red Hat release. Install onto your Red Hat boxes, and now you have not only a standard means of maintaining all student systems incrementally, but also network access to not only all official Red Hat updates but also ancillary packages like additional window managers. If, as seems likely, you have already pared down what services those machines run, the other likely cause of pokey performance is that RH's default GNOME/KDE configuration has gotten steadily more RAM-hungry over the years. Simply switching to a traditionalist's window manager such as ICEwm, Window Maker, Blackbox, etc. might be all the performance gain you need.

I run Debian's Window Maker on a variety of aging systems, and none of them has more CPU or RAM than the systems you describe. All of them strike me as having fine performance. Last time I tried Window Maker retrieved via apt onto Red Hat (RH8, I believe), it was perfectly fine, too.

I'm currently looking at a hard disk install of Knoppix as I've been impressed with its ease of use as a CD-based distro plus it comes "out of the box" with all the tools my coders need.

Bear in mind that the sheer quantity of what Knoppix includes can actually be a bit excessive. If you'd rather build Debian systems a bit more sparsely, you'll want to start them using a different installer. (There are quite a few to choose from.)

Is there an equivalent to rpmfind.net for .deb packages?

Not really very necessary. Debian-stable has something over 8,000 packages available in the official package mirrors. Debian-testing and Debian-unstable have passed 12,000 packages and still growing.

What you might have in mind is the site that chronicles unofficial apt repositories, [link|http://www.apt-get.org/|http://www.apt-get.org/]. If something isn't available from official sources for your branch, you might find it packaged unofficially there, instead. For example, suppose you had an NVidia GeForce 4 video card and need XFree86 4.3.0 compiled for Debian 3.0 = current stable = woody. There's an unofficial source for those packages, whose package-source line you just copy into /etc/apt/sources.list and away you go. Beware that unofficial packages inherently carry much less assurance (i.e., no guarantee at all) of meeting Debian Policy-compliance and security standards for official packages.

Would it be worth my time to set up a local file server for updates and new .deb packages?

Sure. This is easy to do. Install apt-proxy. Its home page and some documentation are at [link|http://apt-proxy.sourceforge.net/|http://apt-proxy.sourceforge.net/].

How risky is it to use Debian 'unstable'?

The downside is that something serious (or non-serious) may break whenever you perform the apt-get dance, so it's recommended only for people who've gained considerable experience and confidence with understanding and debugging Debian and its package subsystem. If you're new to Debian and willing to be a bit bold, venture as far as Debian-testing, but not Debian-unstable.

Are there any gotchas I should be wary of?

Well, if you're installing Knoppix to a hard drive, you're starting with a slightly variant system that's eight parts Debian-testing, one part Debian-unstable, and one part God-knows-what. That hasn't been a problem in my experience (the natural thing to do is track Debian-testing, thereafter), but be aware that there will be occasional slight differences from orthodox Debian systems. For example, your initial default runlevel will be 5 (like RH) rather than Debian's more usual runlevel 2.

You may want to delete the username and groupname "knoppix" created as an artifact of using this method of installation:

# deluser knoppix
# delgroup knoppix

Also, Knoppix's provision of literally dozens of locales settings is excessive for an installed system, and results in much wasted time every time package "locales" gets upgraded. So, do:

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

...and unmark all language/country settings (locales) you expect never to use, mark the ones you wish to add, then select the one locale you wish to be primary. Locales will be regenerated one more time.

You may find other useful ideas in my perennially disorganised list of Debian tips, [link|http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips|http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips] . Mind the dust; newer material is generlaly closer to the bottom.

Rick Moen

rick@linuxmafia.com