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First of all, I removed all the stickers relating to some software I never used on this machine. (Replace them with one of these.) Then I examined the BIOS, and used the following settings:
I use boot on CD first, followed by boot on hard drive.
I wasn't sure of the quality of APM or ACPI support, so I used a rather expensive energy saving mode: constant CPU speed, no S2D, closed screen will not shut down the laptop.
Then, I booted on a Debian CD bought along with the magazine Planète Linux, which publishes a special edition for each important milestone of Debian.
I chose the flavour bf24 for maturity and driver availability reasons.
| 4.1 Partitionning | ||
| 4.2 Modules | ||
| 4.3 Installing the packages | ||
| 4.4 First customisations | ||
| 4.5 Compiling the kernel |
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I partitionned the 40Gb hard disk as following:
hda1 /boot 16Mb hda2 / 1Gb hda3 swap 516Mb hda5 /usr 6Gb hda6 /var 1Gb hda7 /home rest |
I set up all the partitions to Ext3 (except
swap of course). It might actually be useless, or
cause problems for /boot and /usr. Make your own decision.
I also performed a full surface test; this allows to check that the laptop has not been too mishandled while shipping.
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The installation allows to choose the modules that are loaded at start-up. I took this opportunity to change what I think are the most important ones:
The 3c59x module loaded fine with no parameters. I included it in the kernel later on.
The i810 module worked very well, although I do not think I
am using it at its best. In fact, festival told me I
had to use sox for sound output.
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It is advisable to set up an Ethernet network to enable DHCP
from the start. This can be configured after installation (man interfaces),
but it's more convenient to do it during the installation.
I chose to install almost all the development packages, X, and some servers such as PostgreSQL and Apache. Of course you should adapt the selection to your own needs.
A very important point: think in advance of the name you want to give to your laptop. There is nothing worse than staring at an empty blue dialog box, and realising that this is where you will lose most of your time.
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This is where the real customisation of the laptop starts. In my opinion, if you have an Internet connection, the first thing to do is to update the packages.
This can be done during the installation (by using a FTP or HTTP source). As I was behind a firewall, I modified my `/etc/apt/sources.list' as followed, instead.
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free # deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free # deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free deb http://marillat.free.fr/ stable main deb http://marillat.free.fr/ testing main # deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main # Uncomment if you want the apt-get source function to work deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free # deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable non-US |
The changes consist in inserting testing in addition
to stable, and supressing the lines relating to the
CD-ROM. Christian Marillat's site, (http://marillat.free.fr/)
gives access to mplayer and mencoder later on.
Remember to make a backup copy, or use emacs' wonderful
version-control option. (Note from the translator: if
your editor is just an editor instead of being an operating
system, using CVS on all of /etc is a good idea too.)
After editing `/etc/apt/sources.list', issue the two magical commands:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade -u
and your system will update itself with the latest security patches and the latest package versions.
Go get a coffee or a beer as this is a rather long operation. Tea also works for our Commonwealth readers.
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To get the best performance out of the graphics card and the hardware in general, it is advisable to compile the kernel and the relevant modules. The following commands will help a long way:
apt-get install libncurses5-dev apt-get install kernel-package apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.20 |
libncurses5-dev is only to allow make menuconfig
while configuring the kernel. You may also want to choose a
different kernel version. The most recent one is usually a
good choice.
You should then decompress the files and prepare the nVidia modules:
cd /usr/src tar xjvf kernel[TAB] ln -s kern[TAB] linux apt-get -t unstable install nvidia-glx-src nvidia-kernel-src apt-get install xlibmesa-dev tar zxvf nvidia-kern[TAB] |
The nVidia drivers are fetched with `-t unstable', as only unstable support the GeForce4 440 Go card as of this writing.
It's now time to make [menu|x|]config in `/usr/src/linux'
to configure your kernel. Here are some tips:
I also recommand getting an USB mouse, and therefore set USB in the kernel; it works very well with XFree4 and hotplug.
Now compile the kernel:
cd /usr/src/linux make-kpkg clean make-kpkg kernel_image cd ..;dpkg -i kernel-image-*.deb cd linux; make-kpkg modules_image cd /usr/src/nvidia-glx[TAB]; dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc cd ..; dpkg -i nvidia-*.deb |
and reboot....
You can also check my configuration file for reference.
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