Debian Installation :: How To Activate Squeeze From Console
Mar 11, 2011
Installed Squeeze from a CD image (lxde) but the desktop environment did not appear, only a text login. Downloaded lxde using aptitude, but haven't a clue as to how to activate it from the console, or anything else other than aptitude, for that matter. Openbox is part of lxde, and with my Lenny I could bring it up from the command line with the command <openbox>; not now. Can't get on to the internet, so am writing this with Damn Small Linux on a CD.
I'm trying to do is protect the computer against housemates. The standard procedure I do with Lenny:
1. Password protect BIOS.
2. In BIOS, always boot from hard drive. Disable booting from any other device such as USB or CD-ROM.
3. Password protect Grub (v1) using the "password --md5 $1$9MuaA/$5TDLgvmcEiCWNr5W9VaMK1" syntax in my menu.lst file.
With the above precautions in place, [I think] the only way to gain root access to the system is to take the case lid off and proceed to do stuff physically (like set jumpers and/or take out the hard drive). Am I correct? My reasoning for this is, the computer boots -> must boot from HD -> must load Grub -> must go to default menu item since others are protected, and cannot command prompt in Grub without password.
Anyhow, In Squeeze, I was a bit disappointed to find out, after doing a bit of Google-research, that Grub v2 (which is standard on Squeeze now) does not easily support password protecting the Grub menu. Am I correct? Will this issue perhaps be addressed in the Squeeze final release? Is this feature dumb anyways because the Grub password is of no use (i.e. my paragraph above is complete horseradish)?
Another thing I would like to do is change the console font and size back to something more "normal" or "classic", not some crazy tiny font that's only found in totally bleeding edge Linux distrubutions <gasp!>. I found that the Squeeze console font (e.g. when I type Ctrl+Alt+F1) is wicked tiny. I wanna change it to "normal". Grub v2 password and console font config?
After reinstalling Squeeze's base system, the console font is too small to read comfortably. I tried to pass the kernel parameter vga=0x303 without success. After init starts the font reverts to a very small font that I cannot read comfortably on my 17 inch TFT LCD monitor.
After an update on squeeze about a week or two ago, my console font turned green. I'm not exactly sure of the timing, because I switch between lenny and squeeze, and some time passed between the update and the reboot in squeeze.
During the update, I was asked if I wanted to keep my altered /etc/grub.d/00_header or take the package maintainer's version. I took the PM's version, knowing I'd lose my edit (set gfxpayload=1024x768x16). When I add that line to the new 00_header, run update-grub and reboot, the console font is the size I want, but it's a dull green. Reminds me of my first computer. How do I get it back to white and keep the 1024x768 resolution?
Currently booting with grub-legacy and chainloading grub2. If I boot entirely with grub-legacy, and pass vga=791, the console font will be white. It doesn't matter which kernel I use. Currently, I'm running 2.6.32-3-686. Same behavior exists if I use 2.6.30-2-686. If I use 1024x768x8 I get a dull gray instead of dull green.
I have been using my system for couple of weeks, and normally update software when the icon is displayed on top bar (gnome). Last couple of days there were updates for X, and I am not sure whether that is the cause of my problem. Once bootup, I get the login screen. When enter the password the login screen keep coming back. there is no error about any password issue, or anything. It keeps prompt me to enter the password.
I could login back the following way.
1. ctrl + alt + F1 , and login with the same username/pwd as for X 2.change to root 3.pkill gdm3 4.exit from root to user privilege 5. startx
The system starts X correctly and no login screen is displayed. I could use the system as usual.
The only thing I did custom to my system was upgrading to the latest kernel (2.6.38) using the source. This was to get support for my hardware, but that was about a month ago. I do not see anything in /var/log (X, demesg etc).
I installed 2.6.38 from backports. It boots OK, and among the start-up messages it says it has started kdm, but then it offers only a console login prompt, no GUI. I assumed (perhaps optimistically?) that newer kernels would be backward-compatible, and that any dependencies on other software would be enforced by the package mechanisms. Running amd64, Squeeze, KDE.
My Squeeze installation has the horrific 80x25 line display, and I cannot stand it. I know it can do better, because the grub screen is very tiny. I ran dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, but the offerings there aren't much better. I don't know what happened to the good ol' days of grub when all you had to do was pass vga=791 to the kernel to get a decent console size... but it seems they are gone.
I don't really understand this new v2 grub... I don't know why it was necessary to change how it was configured, when it seemed to work so exquisitely. how I would accomplish the functional equivalent of passing vga=791 (1024x768@75hz) to the kernel in grub
I have and old PC and for last years i had Debian Lenny on that and it was working great but after the Squeeze release, i downloaded the first CD image and did a fresh installation but after this it boots up with no problem (i must say since in Squeeze installation the option of creating a floppy diskette was not working properly i use SuperGrubDisk2 to boot the Debian), but few seconds after logging in, the system hangs (or maybe only the X11 since i use a historic nVidia TNT2 Riva graphic card!).
This topic began in the Debian Development forum here I have successfully completed both the install and the after installation configuration. I have a fully functional system on this little baby, inspite of the fact that wireless (Broadcom bcm4312), ethernet (Realtek) and sound were initially broken.
There is a lot of assistance out there on the web. In the previous thread, I was having trouble installing any debian on a usb stick. The issues that needed resolving were 1. Bad stick
2. Incompatible kernels between boot.img and .iso
3. The method of copying .iso to the stick that finally worked was wget My first successful usb install was Lenny. Even though I upgraded the stock system with lenny-backports, I could not get wireless, ethernet or sound working the only connection I could get to the internet was through my 3g stick and that was not performing up to it's capability. I manually configured wvdial to get that working.
I attempted an upgrade to squeeze several times and each time the upgrade trashed the system. I finally found squeeze boot.img and .iso files from an eee pc blog. This allowed a fresh install of Squeeze and I was making progress. The little atom processor would not handle the b43-fwcutter driver, so I compiled one from the Broadcom site written especially for the atom processor. Now I had cable broadband supplied wireless. I got my ethernet working with help from the Gnome site technical specs on Network Manager. Simply changing ifupdown=false to ifupdown=true in the network manager config file.
Sound was activated by help from a blog entitled "Debian on the Dell Mini 9" My head is spinning now or I would be more specific and instructive on all I did to get this baby up and running. If anyone asks, I may do a how-to.
PS: Posted from that Dell Mini 9 running Debian Squeeze.
Debian Lenny worked just great. That was my first experience of Debian. The installer recognised all my hardware and the system was soon up and running brilliantly with a few tweaks. Confident of Debian's reliability, I decided to move to Debian 6 and did a fresh install, with downloads of the new operating system rather than a distribution upgrade. The installation routines have not worked for the same computer system. I don't know if its hardware not being recognised by Debian 6 that were recognised without a problem by Debian 5??
At first, the boot-up flipped at "Waiting for /dev to be fully populated," there was a kernal panic then Debian disappeared. No signal was sent to the monitor and I had to switch off the computer manually I was able to look into the Debian 6 OS from Arch Linux, installed on different partitions of the same hard-drive. I am able to overwrite the Debian files as root from Arch. My i686 machine has PATA IDE drives.
Why are 2) dbus and the 3) avahi-demon failing? I need to get them started first so that I can get an internet connection and try and correct the problem with X and the wrong Nvidia driver. Is there some configuration I can do either from Arch, where I am now, or the bash prompt on Debian? Thanks in advance.
I haven't used Debian in 1 year or so and would like to know if there is any possible way to do a fresh installation of Debian Lenny or Squeeze (either or) and not install Exim? I get to the package selection section of the Debian Installer and I de-select "Desktop Environment" & "Standard System" so nothing is selected and it still be default installs Exim. Is there a way to omit this from the install?
My laptop is Toshiba Portege 2000. Every time after I installed new ubuntu release, I have to replace the xorg.conf to fix the resolution problem b/c I got 800 x 600 screen only. However, after the 10.04 installation. I only got 1/2 of the screen of resolution. I cannot even see most of my terminal screen.
I go to the image site for ia64 (given that my machine has an Intel Atom N450) and put the mini.iso and netboot.tar.gz files on the key, then plug it into the machine and attempt to boot. It doesn't get recognized.
On my squeeze OS I have texlive-latex3 installed and I wanted to install revtex package of the American Physical Society. While trying to install I was prompted to run #unzip revtex4-1-tds.zip -d /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/ However my machine does not have /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/ Instead it has /usr/local/share/texmf/ Will it be all right if I insert this location after -d ?
Can't understand what's going on... Running 'apt-get update' I see that diffs are downloading with a normal speed (11.3 Mbyte by 49 seconds = ~ 227 Kbyte/sec - it's OK, my 'up' limit is 384 Kbyte/sec). But - running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' I see that packages are downloading w/ around 4000 byte/sec. WTF? What's the difference between downloading packages' diffs and packages themselves?
I've changed 6 mirrors - from oficcial (ftp.us.debian.org) to local (ftp.mgts.by). I've tried netselect-apt - no result. Still normall speed on 'apt-get update' and terrifying speed on 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
Are there any special steps I'd need to take to install Squeeze AMD64 on a server with two quad-core Xeons? I had no issues installing Server 2003 x64 and XP Pro x64 on the box, but I seem to remember seeing something somewhere about XenServer in the kernel images.
I installed sqeeze on a netbook. Having no optical drive, I created a usb install disk with unetbootin on a laptop running Squeeze stable and the "Debian 6.0.1a DVD 1" iso. Much to my suprise it installed KDE. I expected, and wanted, Gnome. At the tasksel section I checked off "Graphical Desktop Env", "Laptop", and "Standard Sysytem Utilities". I found a similar post regarding this: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=60040 But in this case the OP installed with a netinstall iso and concluded a faulty mirror was the cause. This doesn't make sense in my case as I was using a DVD image which contains, afaik, Gnome, XFCE, and KDE
There surely must be a way to explicitly choose which desktop env. one wants installed. I realize this can be done by doing a base install and using apt-get; but I'm thinking there must be a simpler way using the installer. I tried the "Expert" install and only saw the generic "Graphical Desktop" option again. I figure I must be missing something somewhere. Also, can I get apt-get to recognize my unetbootin stick as a source to fetch from? I tried apt-cdrom and different entries in sources.list but I can't figure it out. It seems wasteful to me to download hundreds of MBs of packages from a mirror when I have them locally.
I'm new to the Debian, but not to Linux. I've previously used Ubuntu for a few years, so I know something about how a successful installation should look like. I'm currently using Windows 7.
I downloaded the debian-6.0.3-amd64-gnome-netinst.iso from [URL] ...., and then made a USB pendrive using the Windows version of Unetbootin. The MD5 sum for the .iso-file was the correct one, b663727d7f5b572c329cea8e2ff5e29c.
I used the usual non-graphical setup, without any special options. The installation process went without hiccups until the "Starting up the partitioner" -screen freezes at "Scanning disks...". The bar stops at 50%. It never progresses any farther, even after an hour. It doesn't give any errors either. After I pressed Alt+F4, the last lines were:
Code: Select allpartman: No matching physical volumes found partman: No volume groups found partman: Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... partman-lvm: No volumegroups found
Exactly the same happens with firmware-6.0.3-amd64-netinst.iso too, or any of the live versions I tried. The result of graphical installation was also nothing. The USB pendrive created by LinuxLive USB Creator was nonoperative in exactly the same way.
The computer is brand new, without any previous OS installations. My desktop computer has the following parts:
I'm trying to manually boot (from the GRUB console) into a system set up as follows: crypt partition -> LVM -> root LV, and I'm having some trouble figuring out how to do this from the GRUB console.
I have successfully manually booted a system which is set up as just LVM -> VG -> root LV. All I have to do is load the LVM module. In GRUB, that partition shows up as (hd0,gpt5). Once I load the GRUB LVM module, I can see the logical volume within the LVM as well. (My volume group name is "caesar", and the single logical volume is named "root".)
Code: Select allgrub> ls ... (hd0,gpt5) ... grub> insmod lvm grub> ls ... (lvm/caesar-root) ...
It's fairly simple to manually boot:
Code: Select allgrub> set root=(lvm/caesar-root) grub> linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/mapper/caesar-root grub> initrd /initrd.img grub> boot
Where I am having difficulty is in trying to insert crypt before LVM. I can set up such a scheme, and put a minimal installation on it, without issues. It's booting into it upon reboot that I can't figure out. Once I load the GRUB crypto, cryptodisk and luks modules, I can mount the crypto partition:
Attempting to decrypt master key... Enter passphrase for hd0,gpt5 (<long hex string here>): <type my password> Slot 0 opened grub> ls ... (crypto0) ...
At this point, GRUB sees the crypto partition as (crypto0). But the GRUB LVM module doesn't see "inside" of the crypto partition, so I don't see the root logical volume within the LVM listed; all I see is (crypto0).
Code: Select allgrub> insmod lvm grub> ls ... (crypt0) ...
Setting it as root doesn't work:
Code: Select allgrub> set root=(crypto0) grub> ls / error: disk `crypto0' not found.
So, How do I get GRUB to "see" LVM inside the crypto partition?
I've just setup a fresh installation of Debian Squeeze and am trying to configure the firewall. I ran a search for iptables and got the following results:
When I run an iptables command to add a rule and reboot the new configuration is lost even after I have run the iptables-save command. I can't work out where the iptables config file is/should be stored so I could try editing the file with vi.
When installing squeeze from either a dvd or cd (i've burned loads to see if it was the problem) my computer goes through the installation, until the dreaded step of "selecting and installing software" where the installation stops, and my computer turns itself off because of a kill signal sent to everything. I've tried booting with fb=false, and for some reason acpi=off, and neither of them solved the problem (acpi=off caused my laptop to turn off unexpectedly earlier) (HP 6735s, AMD64 using Turion X2, 4GB Ram)
A Linux user for about 10 years, distro hopping for half of them. Finally found peace with PCLinuxOS (great distro), and MintLinux. When Mint went over to Debian, I thought why not try the original, so here I am.Booted the dvd, checked everything was working well (excellently, actually), and started the install over an existing PCLinuxOS system (dual booting with XP). First time installed while inside the gnome system, from the desktop icon, second and subsequent times from the welcome screen after boot (only text modes were available).In all cases, everything goes fine until I partition and install the packages. Partitioning is no secret to me, unless there is a "Debian way" of doing it: went through "guided partitioning," and chose the existing PCLinuxOS partitions, 37 Gb for /, ext3 (tried ext4 later with same results), and 2 Gb for swap, both on sda (sda1 and sda5). This is a full hard-disk, just for Linux. The other disk is for XP (sdb).
Tried formatting existing partitions, erasing contents of disk, and keeping as is. In all cases, when partitioning is done, the system installation fires up and I see all packages being transferred (up to 100%). Then I have a pop-up window telling me to continue to package manager, which I do, but then I get a message saying that I am trying to install on an "unclean target," over an existing installation (even after fully erasing the disks). It asks whether to continue or not and, whatever I do, I'm taken back to system install again, and see the progress go up to 100% and the same question again.
If I go back to the install menu and ignore the message, jumping to installing grub, I get an error message saying that grub install has failed, and that's it. I can't progress further because of these error messages.If I ignore all and boot without the live dvd, I get a prompt and nothing else, and I can't even use XP. Basically, I'm stuck unless I install another distro again to have a working system.First searched this forum and Google to get answers to this problem, but couldn't find anything applicable to my case.
I am trying to install Squeeze on a HP mini netbook. I have been trying to make a USB to netinstall Squeeze and cannot get it right. I cannot get past the message SYSLINUX 4.02 debian-2010.............. on booting.
I have tried to make the netinstall usb from this [URL] dInstaller I am also trying to understand this [URL] I have also tried using Unetbootin. Nothing works so far. Some simple steps to make a workable USB.
I am currently running 32 bit ubuntu in my PC with 2.5 GB RAM, Intel Pentium Dual Core inside. I am coming to debian soon. I will be installing 64 bit squeeze. Now I have 3 GB of swap space. I do satellite image processing. Therefore what is the recommended swap space for me with the kind of work I do. RAM is in very small amount but as of now I have to stay with it.
Also I am interested to know would KDE be an overkill for my machine. Will I run short of memory when I start image processing?
I burned an .iso of a recent Squeeze Live DVD - KDE edition. I was checking it out but I'm not sure it's reliable for installing.I was wondering if anyone has tried it or could comment.I noticed a few things that was a bit disconcerting.One, there were a lot of 'question marks' in the kickback menu.Is that normal?Two, when you (I) try to reboot the system or otherwise 'leave' the live state, it doesn't reboot properly.Some distributions will 'shut down' and then give you a prompt for taking out your CD or DVD and then there is some script or program that reboots the machine for you. But, the Debian Live DVD I used didn't do that. It's a recent one, dated Dec. 20.What happened is that it just looped back and re-started.There was no prompt or even much of a delay. I couldn't open the optical drive tray at any time.I had to cold restart the machine so I could take the DVD out.
I was disappointed since I thought it is a good project and a worthwhile venture to try and have a live media option for installing the later editions of Debian such as Squeeze or if they can keep up progress, whatever edition it's at.I am a bit hesitant to try this version for a true install so I am wondering what others say.I thought I should go for the 'desktop Squeeze/Testing AMD-64-KDE' CD ISO instead?There's no live media but I have tried the live DVD so it looked okay other than the two issues mentioned.
I am thinking of upgrading from my production Lenny to Squeeze.Is it better to upgrade from Lenny directly, or reformat my hard drive and install from fresh (I do have backup of my /home)?
