I use Linux as my operating system by choice both at home and work - the latter when I can get away with it :-). I find Debian to be a very good distribution and I find it far superior to any of the other distros I've tinkered around with in the past e.g. RedHat, Suse and Slackware to a lesser extent.

Debian is certainly not the distro to start with for newbies, for them I'd say RedHat should suffice. It doesn't really have all the gnome frontends for hardware detection etc. that the others have.

However where it out rivals the other distros lies in a few areas in my opinion, namely:
Ease of upgrade. 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade' suffice.
The amount of testing before a release is made is substantial
The number of packages provided ( in Debian Package Management format ) is substantial compared to other distros. It supports RPM format as well.
Each package contains a man page and documentation.
Strict policies are enforced about where packages can install files etc. Make the end system very clean and easy to root around, through documentation etc.

Here's how I configured Debian on my systems:

Sid Download Monitor & Video Card Modem Scanner Printer Media Reader

Olympus Digital Camera USB WebCam Audio/Sound Card TV Card Playing DVD's Burning CD's

Ripping CD's Webpage Ethernet Card NFS Server NFS Client CD Burner

Downloading Sid

	  export http_proxy=http://proxy.tellabs.com:8080		    
	  export rsync_proxy=proxy.tellabs.com:8080
	  export ftp_proxy=http://proxy.tellabs.com:8080
	  export RSYNC_PROXY=proxy.tellabs.com:8080
	

Rename pseudo-image to sid-i386-X.raw and run rsync for each of the iso images.
To find the directory you are looking for use rsync. Checking from a web browser will probably put in a pub. Note the :: in the address. For directory listings Use
rsync server.somewhere.org::#
for the root directory and
rsync --dry-run server.somewhere.org::debian-cd/2.1/\*
for sub-directories etc.
rsync --verbose --progress --stats --block-size=8192 www.planetmirror.com::debian-cd/unofficial/sid/sid-i386-5.raw .

Now check the images are correct. This can be done by using the following command
md5sum sid-i386-X.raw
This prints out something like
f8fb232d3c1589de63dddcd43b05cc9d sid-i386-5.raw
Make sure that this is the same as the line for that image in the file md5sums on the server where you rsynced from. If not run rsync again.
You can also check by mounting the iso image before burning and making sure everything is correct. To do this type
mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 sid-i386-1.raw /cdrom
If you change directory to /cdrom you can now see the image as though it was a cd you have mounted.

Le voila. Now burn the images onto a cd with cdrecord.
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My video card is a nVIDIA Riva TNT2. In XFree86 4.0.3 this is supported by the nv.o module. However on nVidia's website they provide other modules to use instead. These are the modules that I chose to use as they help to configure the card for my specific needs.

First off run xf86config and set up for the Riva TNT2 etc. Start the Xserver to make sure all is well. If everything is working exit and now we'll set up to use the NVidia modules. Download them from

Edit /ec/ppp/options and comment out the auth with a hash i.e. #auth. Use the following files.

• Insert a card with some images into the reader.
• sudo insmod scsi
• sudo insmod usbcore Usually already loaded anyway
• sudo insmod usb-storage
• sudo mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /path/to/directory

First of this involved setting up apache and mysql-server etc. The defaults are fine for apache. The system webpage is in /var/www and the system cgi-bin directory is /usr/lib/cgi-bin. Put the files in the appropriate locations and everything should be fine. x

For the mysql database. The database resides in /var/lib/mysql/Database. You should set up a password. Use as root ">mysqladmin -u root password 'password'" Create a file as root and normal user called ~/.my.cnf. It should contain
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I used what I needed from the CD-Writing HOWTO. Debian use modules for the device so the following has to be added to /etc/modules.conf

### Added by ronanos 20021217 from CD Writing Howto

options ide-cd ignore=hdc # tell the ide-cd module to ignore hdc
alias scd0 sr_mod # load sr_mod upon access of scd0
#pre-install ide-scsi modprobe imm # uncomment for some ZIP drives only
pre-install sg modprobe ide-scsi # load ide-scsi before sg
pre-install sr_mod modprobe ide-scsi # load ide-scsi before sr_mod
pre-install ide-scsi modprobe ide-cd # load ide-cd before ide-scsi

Place a symbolic link in /dev from hdX to roaster by issuing the command 'ln -s /dev/hdX /dev/roaster' where X is replaced by wherever your burner is. Then add the following to /etc/fstab and subsequently running as superuser 'mkdir /roaster'

/dev/roaster /roaster auto defaults,ro,user,noauto 0 0


You can now mount the roaster by mounting /roaster. To burn ISO images to CD's use cdrecord. Read the section on making ISO images to figure out how to make up a CD.

ronan@ronanos.com