Installing Debian

The next stage in the great pro­ject to migrate back from Debi­an from OpenSol­ar­is: installing Debi­an. Wow, it’s so much easi­er these days! Here are my ran­dom notes from the install. I chose the net­work install option and burned the .iso to a CD. Then I booted from the CD on the boot­load­er (on a Sun Ultra 20, you hold down the F8 key while boot­ing to get to the load­er). Then it was just a mat­ter of pick­ing the options.

First option: graph­ic­al install­a­tion. It’s much easi­er to work on oth­er things and occa­sion­ally glance at the installing sys­tem when there’s a graph­ic­al user inter­face. I was­n’t sure what to use for the domain name, since this com­puter will be used inside the home net­work, so I left it blank for now. I can always change it later. I also picked the easy “one par­ti­tion” option as I saw no need for mul­tiple par­ti­tions. Then, I just let ‘er rip.

These days you get a nice list of pre­defined col­lec­tions to install; I chose the graph­ic­al desktop envir­on­ment (yes, it’s a serv­er that I’ll mostly access via ssh, but why not?), web serv­er, SQL data­base, ssh serv­er. Then it was time to wait and do oth­er things, like noti­cing how it’s rain­ing out­side. Again. April in Van­couver, sigh.

Some time later… Debi­an’s installed, and now I’ve decided to try The Debi­an Way to install Word­Press, rather than installing it by hand as I did last time I set up Word­Press on this box. apt-get update, fol­lowed by apt-get upgrade and apt-get install wordpress installs a bunch of stuff into /usr/share/wordpress, includ­ing a file, wp-config.php, which does­n’t appear in the stock Word­Press install­a­tion. Sure enough, it’s a Debi­an-spe­cif­ic file. Guess I’d bet­ter go and read some doc­u­ment­a­tion. I want to set up sep­ar­ate blogs with sep­ar­ate domain names, not just sep­ar­ate sub-domains, and Word­Press MU does­n’t do that by default. It will be inter­est­ing to see if the Debi­an ver­sion of Word­Press tackles that configuration.