Installing Debian Woody on Dell Inspiron 2600

Written by Taro Sato (taro@physics.ucsb.edu)

Since installing Linux on my laptop always ends up in a mess, I decided to leave a personal note, i.e., not necessarily intended to help others. I don't know much about Linux myself to offer anyone any substantial help. It is really cursory, so unless you know what you are doing, please don't just imitate what is done here (and don't blame me if things stop working for you).

I'm an extremely forgetful person as I have aged, so I will record whatever that is not trivially obvious. Not all the steps are included, of course, but things not included here are mostly self-explanatory stuff.

What's New

May 1, 2004. I did a fresh new install of Debian. For now I'll leave this document for historical purposes, but the new procedure can be found here; it's not very easy to read, though.

June 19, 2003. Hope I don't ever need to go thru this crap again. Nothing new is a GOOD thing...

Configuration

This is a Celeron 1GHz machine (Yes, I'm a cheapo). The notorious i830 chipset with integrated video gave me all kinds of troubles, but using version 4.3 of XFree86 and the kernel version 2.4.20 seems to solve the issues quite easily. I didn't want to go thru all the patching of both XFree86 and the kernel. I may not be using the video to its full capacity now, but I don't care for now...X is working now and most important thing is to get some real work done, rather than becoming a tweaking freak...

Note that BIOS must be A08 (or may be even A07, but not earlier versions). I had trouble with the latest version A09; I could never get XFree86 to work with A09. The boot up message even complained that the BIOS is broken.

The relevant partition for Linux is as follows. This is a dual-boot system, and a couple of partitions are used for Windows XP and a space to share files between Linux and Windows (which is not listed here). /dev/hda5 is the swap partition (~1GB I think...).

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6             197M   83M  105M  44% /
/dev/hda7             2.9G   72M  2.6G   3% /var
/dev/hda8             4.8G  920M  3.7G  20% /usr
/dev/hda9              99M  390k   93M   1% /tmp
/dev/hda10             10G   20M  9.7G   1% /home

Installing Debian

Booted from disk 1 of Debian install disk. To avoid flickering, I need

boot: linux video=vga16:off

• Configure the Keyboard
• qwerty/us
• Initialize and Activate a Swap Partition
• Run a bad-block scan on '/dev/hda5/'?: No
• Are you sure you want to do this?: Yes
• Initialize a Linux Partition (Repeat this step to mount all the necessary filesystems)
• Please select the partition to initialize as a Linux "Ext2" filesystem: /dev/hda6: Linux native
• Run a bad-block scan on '/dev/hda6'?: No
• Are you sure you want to do this?: Yes
• Would you like to mount /dev/hda6 as the root filesystem?: Yes
• Install Kernel and Driver Modules
• I'm not installing off CD-ROM, so configure network via DHCP/BOOTP at this point. Aside from the computer name, use default inputs)
• Configure Device Driver Modules
• Just in case, I choose ntfs under fs and lp under misc. That's it...
• Install the Base System
• Just followed the default setting.
• Make System Bootable
• Where should the LILO boot loader be installed?: Install LILO in the root partition's boot sector. (I have a boot manager so I don't want the MBR to be overwritten.)
• Other bootable partitions: Ignore
• Create Master Boot Record?: No
• Make a Boot Floppy
• Maybe not really necessary at this point...
• Reboot the System
• Have to remove all the bootable media other than the hard disk before rebooting.

Note that after the first reboot the flickering of the screen seems unavoidable. I will fix this by modifying lilo.conf later once the base-config is over.

• Time Zone Configuration
• Is the hardware clock set to GMT?: No (US Pacific for me)
• Shall I enable md6 passwords?: Yes
• Shall I enable shadow passwords?: Yes
• Shall I remove the pcmcia package?: Yes
• Do you want to use a PPP connection to install the system?: No
• I like a simple way of life, so using tasksel, I only install X window system, desktop environment, and laptop system at this point. I don't feel like running the clumsy dselect now either.
• Add a mime handler for "application/*"?: No
• Select locales to be generated: en_US ISO-8859-1, en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8, ja_JP.EUC-JP EUC-JP, and ja_JP.UTF-8 UTF-8
• Which locale should be the default in the system environment?: Leave alone
• Allow SSH protocol 2 only: Yes
• Do you want /usr/lib/ssh-keysign to be installed SUID root?: Yes
• Do you want to run the sshd server?: No
• Do you have a PostScript Printer?: Yes
• Which papersize should be the default?: letter
• Select the desired default display manager: gdm
• Do you want to enable IrDA?: No
• Do you want to use FreeType2 support on Mozilla?: Yes
• Please choose your sound daemon's dsp wrapper: auto
• Manage X server wrapper configuration file with debconf: Yes
• Manage XFree86 4.x server configuration file with debconf?: Yes
• Choose vesa
• Use kernel framebuffer device interface?: Yes
• Please select the XKB rule set to use: xfree86
• Please select your keyboard model: pc104
• Please select your keyboard layout: us
• Please choose your mouse port: /dev/psaux
• Please choose the entry that best describes your mouse: PS/2
• Is your monitor an LCD device?: Yes
• Please choose a method for selecting your monitor characteristics: Medium
• Please select your monitor's best video mode: 1024x768 @ 60Hz
• Select the video modes you would like the X server to use: 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480
• Please select your desired default color depth in bits: 24

Now that Debian is installed, as a root I modify the line with append="" as

  append="video=vga16:off"

  lilo
  shutdown -r now

Updating Kernel

I upgrade the kernel to version 2.4.20.

• Downloaded linux-2.4.20.tar.gz from kernel.org to /usr/src.
• Using apt-get install, install kernel-package, dpkg-dev, debianutils binutils, libc6-dev, gcc, and make.

•   tar -xzf linux-2.4.20.tar.gz
    ln -s linux-2.4.20 linux
  

• Use the previously created .config file. This file needs to be present in /usr/src/linux. I don't want to go thru the pain of running make config. Here is my .config for version 2.4.20.

•   make-kpkg --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image

•   dpkg -i kernel-image-2.4.20_custom.1.0_i386.deb

•   rm linux

•   echo "kernel-image-2.4.20 hold" | dpkg --set-selections

Updating XFree86

I upgrade XFree86 to version 4.3. Follow the installation manual of XFree86. This is easy. I should probably reconfigure XFree86 at this point, and generate /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 by

  dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

• Manage XFree86 4.x server configuration file with debconf?: Yes
• Select the desired X server driver: i810
• Enter an identifier for your video card: Generic Video Card
• Please enter the video card's bus identifier: (blank)
• Enter the amount of memory (in kB) to be used by your video card: (blank)
• Please select the XKB rule set to use: xfree86
• Please select your keyboard model: pc104
• Please select your keyboard layout: us
• Please select your keyboard variant: (blank)
• Please select your keyboard options: (blank)
• Please choose your mouse port: /dev/psaux
• Please choose the entry that best describes your mouse: PS/2
• Emulate 3 button mouse?: Yes
• Enable scroll events from mouse wheel?: Yes
• Enter an identifier for your monitor: Generic Monitor
• Is your monitor an LCD device?: Yes
• Please choose a method for selecting your monitor characteristics: Medium
• Please select your monitor's best video mode: 1024x768 @ 60Hz
• Select the video modes you would like the X server to use: 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480
• Please select your desired default color depth in bits: 24
• Select the XFree86 server modules that should be loaded by default: Everything except xtt
• Write default Files section to configuration file?: Yes
• Write default DRI section to configuration file?: Yes

Now if the configuration file XF86Config-4 has the correct info,

  startx