debian questions

[shortfella]

I'm a real debian newbie so please help me enjoy this great distro.

1) I'm running unstable so I could have kde2.1.1 and xfree 4.02 staight out of the bag. Is this risky? i'm using this as a development box. It does seem more stable than my old mandrake 7.2 box (and faster).

2) Is there an easy way to find files? e.g I'm after make-kpkg. How do I find what deb it is in?

3) What is the best way to remove services? What I did is go into the runlevel directory and change the S to a K. Id there an easier way so I don't have to go into each directory?

4) I wish to re-install so that it will be a tidy install without all the mistakes I have entered. I still have all the unstable package, can I just re-install potato then just dkpg -i *.deb on the unstable packages?

[ 03 April 2001: Message edited by: shortfella ]

[Bradmont]

Originally posted by shortfella:
I'm a real debian newbie so please help me enjoy this great distro.

1) I'm running unstable so I could have kde2.1.1 and xfree 4.02 staight out of the bag. Is this risky? i'm using this as a development box. It does seem more stable than my old mandrake 7.2 box (and faster).

2) Is there an easy way to find files? e.g I'm after make-kpkg. How do I find what deb it is in?

3) What is the best way to remove services? What I did is go into the runlevel directory and change the S to a K. Id there an easier way so I don't have to go into each directory?

4) I wish to re-install so that it will be a tidy install without all the mistakes I have entered. I still have all the unstable package, can I just re-install potato then just dkpg -i *.deb on the unstable packages?

[ 03 April 2001: Message edited by: shortfella ]

1. Not particularly risky at all. Debian unstable is still pretty darn stable ;). I've only had one crash, and I'm pretty sure it was AbiWord's fault.

2. How do you mean find files? How 'bout this: As root, type find -name <filename, can have wildcards> -print . I say to do it as root because if you dont, you'll get a lot of permission errors.

3. To remove stuff you don't use, find its name and do an apt-get remove <package>

4. Do you have broadband? If so, just do a network install of unstable. If not, keep your debs around, make a reference to them in your /etc/sources.list, and do an apt get update, apt-get dist-upgrade

Hope this helps :).

[Tyr-7BE]

Originally posted by shortfella:
I'm a real debian newbie so please help me enjoy this great distro.

1) I'm running unstable so I could have kde2.1.1 and xfree 4.02 staight out of the bag. Is this risky? i'm using this as a development box. It does seem more stable than my old mandrake 7.2 box (and faster).

2) Is there an easy way to find files? e.g I'm after make-kpkg. How do I find what deb it is in?

3) What is the best way to remove services? What I did is go into the runlevel directory and change the S to a K. Id there an easier way so I don't have to go into each directory?

4) I wish to re-install so that it will be a tidy install without all the mistakes I have entered. I still have all the unstable package, can I just re-install potato then just dkpg -i *.deb on the unstable packages?

[ 03 April 2001: Message edited by: shortfella ]

My 0.02:

1) Yes and no...if you're running unstable, there's a greater chance that whatever you're running is gonna blow up in your face BADLY. If you don't want to run this risk, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file, and change every instance of "unstable" to "testing". This will still get you the latest software, but it will arrive in the testing zone 2 weeks after it hits unstable. This gives Debian developers a chance to get things down to a few small quirks rather than a HUGE problem.

2) Do you know about dselect? Go to a bash prompt, log in as root, and type "dselect". This is pretty much a front-end for apt, which is a front-end for dpkg. Once you get to the "select" phase, type "/". This allows you to search the entire list. Search for keywords (eg, to install Ximian Gnome requires a few different packages. Searching for "gnome" will let you see them all).

3) Ah....the Achilles Heel of Debian. SysV Init. Yes, it can be a HUGE headache sometimes. The trick is to know that every file in the rcX.d directories is a symlink to something in /etc/init.d. For example, the file S20postfix for me is a symlink to /etc/init.d/postfix. The SXX just tells the computer the order in which to start services. If you want to stop services, just find the source to which they're linked in init.d and either move it or rename it or delete it (careful though...you don't want your init to screw up).

4) If you have all the .deb files in a directory or on a removable media, then this shouldn't be a problem. The key is to have all dependencies met, and to install the dependencies first (actually, dselect has a utility that makes it so you can have a CD or something else as a .deb source rather than apt, so that would take care of a lot of problems). I'm not sure, but you might want to check and see whether dpkg has a recursive option (eg -R) to descend into directories. Probably dpkg --help for info, or "man dpkg". But the short of it is yes, this will work.

Good luck and enjoy Debian...I sure do :)

[Pierre Lambion]

In fact for disbling services, I find that chmod -x on the link is the cleanest way. ls -color will then let you know at a glance what's enabled and what's not. You can re-activate easily the services if you change your mind.

P.