Hot answers tagged system-installation
19
This is a holdover from "ye olde tymes" when machines had trouble addressing large hard drives. The idea behind the /boot partition was to make the partition always accessible to any machine that the drive was plugged into. If the machine could get to the start of the drive (lower cylinder numbers) then it could bootstrap the system; from there the linux ...
15
The Debian CD set contains all of the packages in the main repository. Most of this software can easily be downloaded later. According to the Debian wiki:
Although there are over 30 CDs (or 5 DVDs) in a full set, only the first CD is required to install Debian. The additional CDs are optional and include extra packages, that can be downloaded ...
13
The answer is/isn't sexy, depending on your point of view.
Perl is very useful. Lots of the system utilities are written in or depend on perl. Most systems won't operate properly if Perl is uninstalled.
A few years ago FreeBSD went through a lot of effort to remove Perl as a dependency for the base system. It wasn't an easy task.
13
In Larry Wall's original Perl v1.0 posting to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987, he said:
If you have a
problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds
their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want
to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you.
In a much later ...
12
There's a FAQ on Debian CDs, which also includes this:
Which of the numerous images should I download? Do I need all of them?
No. First, of course you only need to download either CD or DVD images - the two types of images contain the same packages.
Also, you only need the CD/DVD images for your computer's architecture. [...]
Furthermore, ...
10
The main reason for the major enterprisey distro's like Red Hat and I think Suse to use a separate /boot is that they use LVM by default and Grub cannot be used to boot from LVM. It is that simple.
So if you want to use LVM, and that is a boon, you use a separate /boot. Personally, I think it is good practice to use both LVM and separate partitions for a ...
9
Many distributions have some facility for a minimal install; essentially where you manually select only those packages that you explicitly wish to install. Debian has this ability and would be a better choice, in your situation, than the other obvious minimal contender, Arch Linux.
Arch's a rolling release status may provide a level of ongoing complexity ...
9
AIF, the Arch Installer Framework, has been removed from the new ISOs. There will be a formal announcement in the next couple of days. For the moment, you can read the details on the mailing list.
You can now use the Arch Install Scripts as described on the wiki.
There is also this thread on the Arch boards which has some more detail about the reasons ...
9
A CD-ROM and USB stick use entirely different methods to boot. For an ISO9660 image on a CD-ROM, it's the El Torito Specification that makes it bootable; for a USB stick, it needs a Master Boot Record style boot sector.
ISOLINUX, the bootloader that is used in ISO9660 CD-ROM images to boot Linux, has recently added a "isohybrid" hybrid mode that uses some ...
8
Download the netinstall iso, boot it and select non-graphical install. I actually made a video once for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOGSupJury4
The difference between ubuntu and debian is the way they are doing package testing. Debian is all about stability and ubuntu is more about all the new things (less stability).
8
You can boot the machine with a live CD OS. This will allow you to move /var without corrupting the OS.
I have done this in the other direction with /tmp, /var, /opt, and /usr on a SLES install. I think it would work on others distros.
Boot the live CD
Mount the old /var partition in /mnt/var
Mount the real root directory in /mnt/root
Correct ...
7
You will notice differences certainly. Most noticable will be differences in the standard userland utilities. FreeBSD does not use GNU ls, GNU cp, and so on. For example, if you're attached to a colorized ls, you may want to alias ls to "ls -G". It does use GNU grep, though. The default shell is a much simpler and less bloated shell than GNU Bash, which ...
6
One final reason, less important than those given, is it can allow the PC to remain bootable if part of the disk is corrupted. The more partitions you have, the easier it will be to simply not mount the partition with the fault.
This can be useful sometimes, but usually there's a better way anyway.
EDIT: Another point: assuming Linux, using LVM can be a ...
6
If you do not care at all for the data stored on that machine you can perfectly insert a bootable install CD and install into that debian partition, which will probably get formated before the new Linux is installed. The new Linux will see the partition with the Windows installation and have Windows as boot option.
That's not more problematic than any other ...
6
I think I found the answer: blkid
From the man page:
The blkid program is the command-line interface to working with the
libblkid(3) library. It can determine the type of content (e.g.
filesystem or swap) that a block device holds, and also attributes
(tokens, NAME=value pairs) from the content metadata (e.g. LABEL or
UUID ...
6
Assuming you are on nix and the distro you are interested in is oneiric ozelot or above then the following should work
sudo dd if=<isofile> of=/dev/sd<USBSTICK> oflag=direct bs=1048576
Please be triple careful with the argument to of. dd will NOT check if it's sensible/mounted/empty/..., it will just write. If you happen to specify your root ...
6
Follow these steps:
Start up Windows just like you normally would, and download the latest (non-test) version of Plop Boot Manager here.
Extract the zip and open the folder "Windows" in it.
If you have Windows XP, double-click the file InstallToBootMenu.bat.
If you have Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, right-click the file InstallToBootMenu.bat, ...
5
In your installer, at the partitioning stage:
Resize your Ubuntu partition to something smaller; a decent partitioner will tell you the limits in which you can do this. For example if the data in a 100GB Ubuntu partition is taking 80GB, you cannot resize it to a smaller size than that.
Create a fresh partition in the empty space, and install Fedora there.
...
5
I think this is more of a personal preference than anything else. Might even be a best-practice.
My personal view of /boot is rather read-only based. Once in a while you need to write in there to upgrade your kernel or maybe add another OS in the grubloader. Besides that it's just needed to ... well, boot. So having it in a separate filesystem might help ...
5
First of all, you might not want to reinvent the wheel... There are several kiosk-focused distributions. One of those might save you a lot of work.
Second, if you are familiar with Kickstart on Fedora and RHEL(or CentOS or Scientific Linux), you can use the Fedora tools to make your own spin of any of those distributions. The documentation is a bit ...
5
Ubuntu's Wiki
As @Hippo mentioned you can look at the LTS page which has this chart:
Wikipedia Page
Also wikipedia has a nice chart:
Ubuntu EC2 List
Finally, Ubuntu provides a directory of their EC2 images:
http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/
And a list of official Ubuntu AMI images:
http://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami/
5
I'm working on an update to this question/answer.
This doesn't work without errors, but as I worked with @jiewmeng I uncovered that the goal was to use a USB to install both Windows and Ubuntu onto one hard drive, UEFI.
It has taken a while and I've found the solution but we need to clean the question and answer.
Maybe the original question can be answered ...
5
Following method works with CentOS 6.2:
Requirements: USB flash drive (at least 4 GB, I used a 16 GB one)
Download an ISO image from a mirror - I chose the full 1st DVD image to avoid a network install (because it is not clear if the cryptographic package signatures are checked by the installer or not), e.g.:
$ wget ...
5
CentOS's installer, Anaconda, supports a couple of different installation methods that you can use to help your remote administrator. Quoting from the project's web page:
Installation can be scripted with kickstart to provide a fully unattended installation that can be duplicated on scores of machines. It can also be run over VNC on headless machines.
...
5
What sr_ wrote is pretty much what I'd answer.
I'd only add that the most Debian I've ever needed to download was the first CD. Not even DVD. And after a while I realised it wasn't even worth doing that, so I only downloaded netinst images. You can have a base Debian installation in half an hour, boot into it, and start installing more applications while ...
5
Theoretically, sure. You could theoretically change a Fedora box to Slackware in place, if you cared enough to take the time it would require to do so without destroying something.
Generally, it's seen as not worth the effort.
You'll notice, after reading the CentOS/SL documentation, that they don't even recommend upgrading between major releases in-place, ...
5
The basic question is slightly hard to answer, as files could have been touched at various points.
One file that doesn't get touched very often, and is created when the machine is first booted up, is the ssh private key file for the server. Look at /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key. Unless you're re-keying the ssh server, that file should be the installation date ...
4
In answer to the 'what problems might it cause' part of the question: as with any partitioning there is always a risk that you will come to need more space than you initially allocated. While this is unlikely in the case of /boot, there was recently an issue with pre-upgrade in Fedora caused by small /boot sizes.
4
Usually many distros provides 'network' installation disk - including Debian. If you have normal broadband connection probably the easiest way is to install via network install as:
You download only things you need
You (usually - I'm not sure about Debian) don't need to update things right after installation as the newest package is installed with all ...
4
As requested by OP.
If you are looking for the time, when the system was setup, there isn't a way to determine that. For one, the system might have been cloned (not installed) which would effectively fake the file creation time.
You can estimate the age by searching for oldest files.
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