Bibek Paudel’s weblog

Not much to write today but I have moved back to Debian, having installed its latest stable release (5.0) named “Lenny.” I used the CD image for installation instead of DVD and the installed amount of desktop applications surprised me at first. They are very less in number. Even usual applications like OpenOffice.org, XChat, Pidgin, Transmission etc weren’t installed. The Synaptic Package Manager, GParted and other utilities were missing too. I have uploaded a full-size screenshot of my desktop for the reason that both GIMP and Imagemagick are not present in my system at present

My Debian Lenny Desktop

Here is a list of steps for those who might want to try what I did:
To install Synaptic package manager:

1. Open the file “/etc/apt/sources.list” in a text editor and add these lines (skip if they are already present):

   deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
   deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

2. Enter the command “apt-get install synaptic” as a root user.

My DVD drive isn’t working for some reason lately. I had to install using the CD image located in my hard disk. Steps:

1. Download initrd.gz and vmlinuz files from: http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian5.0/main/installer-i386/20090123/images/hd-media/
2. You need to have an existing GNU/Linux operation system in your computer. Copy the downloaded files to some location readable by GRUB (or LILO). I copied them to a folder named “lenny_install” in my /boot partition (/dev/hda7).
3. Edit the GRUB configuration file (/boot/grub/menu.lst in Debian systems) and add these lines (be careful to replace (hd0,6) with your own correct partition name):
   

   title Debian Lenny Installer
   kernel (hd0,6)/boot/lenny_install/vmlinuz
   initrd (hd0,6)/boot/lenny_install/initrd.gz

4. Locate the DVD/CD iso image in a partition that won’t be used during your new installation. If possible, remove/rename the other isos in your hard disk as it might confuse the Debian installer later.
5. Reboot your system and choose the option “Debian Lenny Installer” from GRUB menu. After entering language and keyboard settings in the installer, opt for installation via hard-disk.