Notes on installing Debian Sarge

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Using the Debian 3.1 (Sarge) Installation

Here is a write up of doing a minimum Sarge installation to produce a Python-based network application (for Allegra) test bed.

Do the network install, boot from the initial CDROM and select the workstation, file and web server options. When it prompts you to pick a URL for a site to download the rest from, pick a speedy site. If you pick a slow site you can ctrl-C the process and then later resume it using a package selection tool, the tasksel tool (see the Debian installation docs) is the simplest (and what appeared during the installation process). There is also an advanced tool called: dselect

Once the install is finished log in as the user you added and then adjust the account group membership.

Edit the smb.conf to allow writing to home directories (to allow you to copy files from a windows box onto the machine).

Add the user to the Samba password database with:

smbpasswd -a username

Now, after a reboot you should also be able to connect via Windows file sharing to the user's home directory and copy files to and from it.

Because I had selected "vesa" for the X11 graphics driver at installation time only the 800x600 and 640x480 display modes were available, on reading the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file it appeared that running the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 tool would walk me through the installation configuration steps, and it did. But after a reboot I still did not have any resolutions higher that 800x600. So I hand edited this section:

    SubSection "Display"
        Depth     24
        Modes    "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600"
    EndSubSection

so that it now has the 1280x1024 and 1024x768 modes and after a reboot I was able to run in those modes plus some more.

Setting up the VNC server. As with the Knoppix installation, following this writeup on configuring RealVNC worked quite well. As the Debian installer used "gdm" for the desktop login I followed the simpler gdm notes. ran the vnc install script.

When I went to run the "vncserver" for the first time it said:

svermeul@orion:~$ vncserver

You will require a password to access your desktops.

vncpasswd: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I found this artical that suggested doing:

apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

this fixed the problem.

Here are the new lines in the /etc/services file:

vnc        5950/tcp    vncraw
vnca        5951/tcp    vncrawa

and here are the added lines in the /etc/inetd.conf file:

vnc stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/bin/Xvnc :1 -inetd -query localhost -geometry 1232x900 -depth 24 -once -securitytypes=none

vnca   stream   tcp wait   svermeul /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/bin/Xvnc -inetd -query localhost -geometry 1232x900 -depth 24 -once -passwordFile=/home/svermeul/.vnc/passwd

Debian installation manual, general Debian doc, network install images,

Some notes on installing pysqlite under Debian, using apt-get.

Adding a new user under Ubuntu.

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See also:

Using the Debian 3.1 (Sarge) Installation