GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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29 Apr 2006

Standard install (see Section 4.1.3). Choose boot media with F12 on boot. MS/Windows XP Professional is already installed, so use the Debian GNU/Linux installer to reduce the NTFS partition size, but keep it, and repartition the remainder, ending up with a dual boot machine.

Install: lang=English, location=Australia, kb=American English, network through DHCP, hostname=ganesha, resize NT partition.

The repartitioning of the pre-existing MS/Windows NTFS partition is handled directly by the Debian GNU/Linux installer. To resize the NTFS partition, select the partition:

  #2 primary 95.2GB ntfs

Press Enter to invoke ntfsresize to get information about what can be done. This can take some time. We want to keep this NTFS partition but make it smaller. Choose the size (20GB) and write changes to disk.

Then partition the new free space as a Desktop Machine. The default Desktop partition was then:

/	7G	sda5
/home	65G	sda7
swap	3G	sda6

Grub automatically noticed MS/Windows XP and added an appropriate entry for booting.

The machine is now rebooted. Rebooting into MS/Windows resulted in a dirty volume being noticed, and MS/Windows ran chkdisk to verify files, indexes, and security, and all was okay.

Reboot back into Debian.

Set root passwd, user account, apt install.

Package installs: exim4 (smarthost with no local delivery).

Point apt to unstable and install sudo and wajig, and all the rest!

StartX (choosing defaults for setup) seems okay (choosing vesa driver). Replace with i810 driver.

Install kernel-image-2.6.16-1-686-smp. In /etc/fstab change the /dev/hda to /dev/sda and tell Grub to boot from /dev/sda5:

  # kopt=root=/dev/sda5 ro