mdlbear | A first look at Etch (Reply)

For a variety of reasons, including a coworker's wish to try the latest version of the SableVM Java virtual machine, and my own desire to try some of the shiny new packages mentioned in DWN, I set out yesterday morning to install Debian's testing distribution, code-named Etch.

My first attempt involved copying my running stable (Sarge) partition into the partition that had held my previous working partition, RedHat 7.3, until I blew it away. I then chroot'ed into it, mounted /proc in the approved manner, edited /etc/apt/sources.list, and attempted to upgrade. It croaked somewhere around upgrading the kernel. I'm guessing that it has something to do with the switch from devfs to udev for managing devices.

My second attempt involved blowing the partition away again and running debootstrap. That actually got as far as installing a kernel, but grub (the bootloader) wouldn't install. Again probably a /dev issue. And when I tried editing my main grub menu, that didn't work either. No joy anywhere. I could probably have recovered, but by then my coworker had done a successful install from the daily snapshot of the installer.

The clincher was discovering that I had messed something up in my Sarge partition -- probably moved a config file that I meant to copy, or something equally stupid. Nothing for it at that point but to borrow the installer disk and do it right. Should have started out that way...

I'm used to smooth installs with the current Debian installer, but this one was just plain magic. Perhaps because of the switch from XFree86 to X.org, I was only asked one question about the display at initial configuration time: what resolutions I wanted. That's it. The whole nightmare of probing, guessing modelines, and finally giving up and trying to upgrade an older config file that sort of worked, was gone. It just plain worked. The rest of the configuration questions appeared to be unchanged from Sarge.

For those unfamiliar with the Debian installer, it works in two phases. The first phase configures your language, timezone, and network, and walks you through the process of partitioning and formatting your disk (if you need it). Then it unpacks and installs a very minimal system from the CD, asks you where to install the bootloader, and reboots.

The second phase asks you another series of questions to set up usernames, passwords, email, and -- probably the most important -- where you're going to get your packages from. It then lets you select one or more broad "tasks" from a checklist: this is where you pick things like "workstation" and "web server". Then it starts downloading packages. It's amazing how fast you can suck down hundreds of megabytes of packages over a 100MHz ethernet from a local mirror. Finally, each package gets its chance to ask you whatever configuration questions it has; that's where things like the display size get configured. Then they all get installed without any further fuss.

Note that unlike desktop-oriented distributions like RedHat, all the configuration is done with text menus. If you're setting up a server, you don't have to install any of the GUI packages -- a full-featured Debian web server fits in less than 500MB. You can do it in even less if you're more selective.

An hour or so after I started I was happily and productively logged in, having installed my favorite editor (emacs) and window manager (ctwm), and copied the relevant parts of /etc/fstab, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and the ssh host keys. The one oddity in the whole process was that ssh wasn't installed by default as it used to be, and wouldn't install unless shadow passwords were enabled. (I normally disable them because we use NIS -- the old Sun Yellow Pages -- and it doesn't play nice with the shadows.) I'm not going to worry about it.

Next step is to install it on my workstation at home.