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Installing a bare bones debian installationI have a rather old laptop that thankfully is almost completely supported under debian. Unfortunitally I have a tiny 3 GB HD that I would like to keep mostly free for documents and such (I intend to use this as a programming platform, and I tend to keep multiple copies of things as a kind of version tracking). My quesiton is as follows: My preferred method of installing debian would be to go through the installer, and manually selecting packages to get the following: xfwm4 mozilla-firefox gaim madwifi kdm There might be a couple other packages I get in the future (a graphical text editing app comes to mind) but that's not real significant. My issue is that I CANNOT start X if I only install those packages. I get an error that reports "X: cannot stat /etc/X11/X (No such file or directory)" I assumed this was because none of these apps asked to configure my Xserver, so I ran XF86config to configure it, but the message remains. I tried creating a symbolic link from /etc/X11/X to /etc/X11/XF86config which was created...but that did no good, X complains that the file is a symbolic link. I also tried copying the file, but X complained that it was a symbolic link again. I have tried the preconfigured "desktop" installation, and that will run X just fine, but it's too bloated for my tastes. I just realized I haven't asked a quesiton yet...I swear I'm getting to it. Anyway, what packages need to be installed so that xfwm4 will run? I thought KDM was my problem, but it just jumps back to my commandline with no error. I'm really at my wit's end...I chose debian as my installation because I've heard people do nothign but brag about apt's intelligent package management...and on systems I've been on that everything was already configured as far as the base installation, it's really slick, but it seems that if you want to manually build the installaiton form the ground up, it's not quite as intelligent as I had hoped. Thanks ahead of time for you help. -Kevin Bookmark/Search this post with: 
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Are you using 'sarge' 'etch'
Are you using 'sarge' 'etch' or 'sid'? There have been a few very big changes with X since sarge (for example, XF86 was dumped and Debian now uses X.org)
I'm on WinDos at the moment so I can't search myself, but you can try:
apt-cache search "xwindows-"
and hopefully it gives you an idea what to install. Otherwise, for X to run you need the "server" (which actually draws things), and the client - all the software is usually split into "common" (bits needed by both server and client), "server" and "client". However there are usually packages which have words like "core" in them and these may install both client and server.
re: Are you using 'sarge' etch'
I am currently using sarge 3.1. I had considered upgrading to etch. I'll grab a testing iso later today. Thanks for your help, I'll probably set up a virtual machine and see if I can get it running searching for xwindows.
Using etch
I have started experimenting with using etch to create my installation, and it is atleast progressing much better, I think. I did get a little kick out of the message that said X might not install right. The issue I'm having now is that, while I seem to have xfce installed, as well as kdm, adding the xfwm.desktop file to the sessions folder doesn't seem to make xfce available for kdm to load, and I end up with a desktop with no functionality (I have to ctrl+alt+backspace to get back to KDM) I'm currently installing KDE in hopes that it will atleast get setup right, and maybe I can use it's configuration as a base.
Anyone have any other helpful hints?
exec xfce4-session
My guess is that kdm is looking for other window managers (and maybe even Gnome), but is not finding xfce4.
You can try putting
exec xfce4-session
in your ~/.xsession file. That is what you do if you use plain old xdm. But hopefully kdm has some wort of default window manager option that would check .xsession as well.
It doesn't. Unless you login
It doesn't. Unless you login with the "Default" option.
Kind regards,
Maarten
You take what you get...
Ok, I've gotten debian up and running. Xfce still won't populate itself in kdm...but I'll take small victories where I can get them. Now that I'm having a problem with is my wifi card.
I have a D-link WNA-2330. The research I did before I bought the card said that it worked like a dream with madwifi, I however cannot get it to run, I'm getting a "wlanconfig: ioctl: No such device" error.
A quick search didn't reveal any useful information. I got the madwifi-tools package from the non-free branch. There is also a source package, but I assumed that since I was installling from binary the source wouldn't be necessary. The installation page of the wiki wasn't a whole heck of alot of help. Anyone have any ideas?
Oh, and as a side note...I don't seem to have lspci. I don't know what that's all about, but it's of course annoying, since that's really the best troubleshooting method I could ask for at this point. If anyone knows what I need to get to install that, I would be appreciative.
I haven't tried exec'ing xfce in the .session yet, I'll be adding that here shortly to see if xfce will run.
Thank you SOOO much for all the help so far, I don't think I would have gotten this figured out without it.
running xfce
This may look a little complicated but hey that's customisation! So give it a go, or if you're not game perhaps just try installing gdm and if it works then remove kdm.
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You don't have to use a graphical display manager like kdm/gdm/xdm. Can maybe save some more space by removing them, try this first to see if you like it. (It may not be a lot of space but every bit adds up).
Add xfce to your ~./xsession file as above. Then login at the linux console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and type :
Note - you can start and stop kdm (and some other services) as root:
# /etc/init.d/kdm stop
# /etc/init.d/kdm start
# /etc/init.d/kdm restart
now as user in linux console:
$ startx
(if kdm is not running on vt7)
or
$ startx -- :1
(if kdm is running on vt7, to start a second X on vt8)
To check which *dm's are installed :
$ aptitude show kdm
$ aptitude show gmd
$ aptitude show xdm
If you like this option you can create a symlink to 'startx' called 'x' then all you have to do is login at the console and type 'x' each time to startx:
# ln -s /usr/bin/startx x
(important use lower case x)
Note if you remove all the *dm's then the machine should just arrive at vt1 on boot. There is a chance that at least xdm needs to be installed, in that case it should be smaller than kdm and you can just point /etc/X11/default-display-manager at kdm (which does not exist if you remove it) booting will then produce a single info line during boot saying not starting display manager as not default. Leaving you at vt1 (nice and quickly) where you can login as a user and type 'x' to start xfce.
_________________________________________________________________
Are we just a blip in history, where the working class had too much access to information and freedom?
Ok...so now it doesn't work at all.
So, I actually had the system completely up and working. I had gotten into xfce, with everything but my wireless card working. I installed madwifi (I'm using a D-link WNA-2330 card), and had just compiled it into my kernel. When I rebooted the system would not come up. So I rebooted the machine again, this time choosing the recovery kernel, which booted fine.
I assumed that my problem was the order I had installed madwifi (I had installed the components completely out of the specified order) So I decided that since I had figured out how to get xfce without KDE, and possibly without kdm (thank you gavinnz!) And I, being the space nazi I am, I decided to just re-install completely.
After the format and re-install the system started doing the samething again. Freshly installed, and booting from the hard drive for the first time, the boot process stopped at the exact same time. (I apologise, I don't have the exact error, the context appeared to be something about the video card being found at a new location in memory, and the kernel was remapping it.)
Anyway, I've tried re-installing several times. But the same thing results each time. I'm becoming highly frustrated, as I've taken lots of care to recall my steps so that they could be recreated later. And now these same steps result in the system not booting. Does anyone have any helpful hints? I'm nearing the point where I'm starting to think grabbing a new distro may be necessary, and I'm trying very hard for that not to be my outcome :(.
Thanks for all the help so far.
madwifi, the revenge
Oh bugger...well re-installing is good practice I guess but there really was no need to hose the whole system. I know it's hard to break the habit for anyone that's used win$ht for more than a couple months, it was for me.
Never mind you got it working before so it must work again!
Are you now using the sid cd or the sarge one that will make a difference as set of different kernels amongst other things and this is old hardware so older software will most likely work easiest. ACPI comes to mind here.
Are we just a blip in history, where the working class had too much access to information and freedom?
re: Madwifi, the revenge
I was using the etch CD. A friend passed me the new pclinuxOS minime installer over the weekend, though, and I found it when I got to work this morning. After installing it, low and behold, the whoel thing came up and just worked...I guess I'm going to use this. Though I am STILL goin to get debian working and usible on a machine, this is swear. Hopefully something with a little less finicky hardware, though.
Thank you to everyone for your help. I hate to just give up like this, but it's really hard to turn down an "It just works" situation.
As for why I formatted and re-installed. I'm still deadset on my plan to have as much drive space available to me on this thing as possible, and I figured if I had something on there that wasn't working, AND had packages I didn't need, I would just give it another shot.
Once again. Thank you for all your help.
It just works, yay!
No worries, it is hard to turn down an "It just works". pclinuxOS is very swish I have played with it not so long ago. For me it just looks way too much like windo$ for comfort, which is exactly what they were aiming for - to make ex-windo$ users comfortable so they can use linux and it's of the 'rpm' persuasion.
Other good options if you want to stay with the Debian sector of Linux are Ubuntu/Kubuntu they are based on Debian, so knowledge gained is directly transferable, and are well known to support laptops. This really is the way to go if you plan to get deeper into Debian at a later stage.
As for getting an optomised system you can go two ways:
1 - Start with a full auto installed system then preen it every day, removing only one or two packages every boot. So ensuring that each time you still have a useable system and only one or two steps to go backwards if needed. This allows you to see most of the commonly used packages, learn them and remove the ones you find that you're not using.
2 - The tighter, cleaner way is to install a base only system then install packages as you need them. Starting with command line tools and mc then x-server and desktop/window manager and on, this is the traditional unix way of 'building' a box....but for this you need to have a very good idea of what your preferences are and what's available.
good luck and hope to see you round again.
Are we just a blip in history, where the working class had too much access to information and freedom?
Very small linux
Ah duh trust me to miss the obvious,
Of course there is puppylinux (sort of debian-ish) and dsl (damn small linux, basically business card sized Debian) which only weigh in at aroung 60MB! and they're both livecd so you can have a test look without removing what you have at the moment. DSL has some wireless support.
I doubt that your wifi will work out the box with these but for a small starting point where X, a browser, a filemanager and editor (and more) just work then it should not be too hard to add the wifi support and you should still be bellow 100MB!
Are we just a blip in history, where the working class had too much access to information and freedom?
Puppy has WiFi support & a
Puppy has WiFi support & a config utility, works on most common eq.
I've tried both DSL & Puppy, & Puppy is more fully featured.
It has OpenOffice, FireFox, Java, Wine, & development addons.
There's different versions built for various uses (diversity).