4.17 Base Install

4.17.1 Language

Choose English, Australia, English (US) keyboard.

4.17.2 Networking

During an install DHCP will be attempted to obtain your network information from a DHCP server. This (usually) requires that you identify your host as a host that your DHCP server knows or relies on the DHCP server allocating the next available IP address. Do so just to see if there is a DHCP server available to you.

If a DHCP server is not available then you will be prompted for alternative options, including manually setting up the appropriate network information.

Generally you need the following, where some sample addresses are supplied:

  IP       155.229.8.165
  Netmask  255.255.255.192
  Gateway  155.229.8.190
  Domain   togaware.com
  DNS      183.44.72.1

The information is recorded in /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf. Later on edit /etc/resolv.conf to add search togaware.com so that you can refer to your local machines by their name, without fully specifying the domain.

Some useful commands for trouble shooting are:

  # netstat -n
  # ifconfig -a

4.17.3 Partitions

Partitioning of hard drive(s) can be tricky for the new user. For a new installation you will want to erase the entire disk, which is usually the default option. The Debian Installer provides options to partition your disk in a number of ways. It recommends a simple, single partition, which is a good choice to start with, but choose an option that matches your situation. Another good choice is to create two partitions, one of say 10GB for / and the remainder for /home. This way you can wipe out / and reinstall GNU/Linux and still retain your /home files. Unless you know what you are doing, stay with one of these simpler schemes, although a fuller discussion of Disk Partitioning is included in Chapter 62.

4.17.4 Reboot and User Accounts

Once the base system is installed you are asked to reboot the system. Remove the floppy disk and CD-ROM and reboot the machine. Keep the floppy in if this is how you plan to boot into Linux (otherwise you are probably using GRUB to boot directly into Linux).

You will be asked to set the time zone—choose GMT for a GNU/Linux only machine and NO GMT for dual boot machines.

Enter a password for the root account and create a user account. In general it is best to log in as a user then use the su command to set the user to be root as needed (e.g., to install packages or modify files in /etc).

4.17.5 Package Selections

You will be asked to install a collection of selected packages.

Generally I delay until I’ve got the system basically functioning, then use my own devices to update and install all the packages I want, and hence I skip this step. You can rerun this later with the tasksel command.

4.17.6 EMail: Setup Exim

The default email server for Debian is exim. This can be set up in one of several ways, depending on how you will access your email. The exim configurator will list the options.

Generally, for a networked machine (e.g., Athene) that is not acting as a mail server, but using a remote smarthost (SMTP server) to send email, yet still delivering email locally (which is obtained using fetchmail, for example, from an IMAP server) you will choose option 2.

The information you then supply is:

visible name:       athens.togaware.com 
other names:        none 
domain rely:        none 
network relay:      none 
smarthost:          mailhost.togaware.com 
root email sent to: kayon 

This means that mailhost.togaware.com is used for sending email. Any email sent from Athene to an unqualified address (i.e., no @) will have athens.togaware.com appended to it and delivered locally.

4.17.7 Finished

All done. To revisit the setup process you can run -, base, config later.



Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2021 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0