If you live in NewZealand, you might be interested in rate-limiting downloads thanks to terrible queuing and rate-limiting on many ADSL services.
apt-get(8) uses its own built-in code for retrieving packages via HTTP or FTP, instead of relying on an external program like wget(1), and doesn't offer any rate-limiting options. There are two main ways to throttle its bandwidth consumption anyway:
The second route is much easier, but note that using trickle(1) will also rate-limit any child processes spawned by your command -- if APT restarts any daemons, they will be rate-limited! You should therefor do two separate passes with apt-get(8): a trickle(1)-controlled one to download packages, and a separate one without trickle(1) to install the downloaded packages. You can do this with a command such as
trickle -d $KBPS apt-get --download-only upgrade && apt-get upgrade
You may also use trickle only in the http and ftp file retrieval "plug-ins" of apt. For the http method :
dpkg-divert --local --rename /usr/lib/apt/methods/http echo '#!/bin/sh' > /usr/lib/apt/methods/http echo '/usr/bin/trickle -s -d 10 /usr/lib/apt/methods/http.distrib' >> /usr/lib/apt/methods/http chmod 755 /usr/lib/apt/methods/http
Do the same for the ftp method. The "-d 10" sets a ratelimit of 10KB/s. You may want to take out the -s/-d switches and configure trickled.
You have configured debconf not to ask questions, possibly after an AutoInstall. You can fix this using the following command:
dpkg-reconfigure --frontend=dialog --priority=low debconf
Put the package on hold, like so:
echo "packagename hold" | dpkg --set-selections
cd /var/lib/dpkg/info/
for PKG in *.list ; do
while read FILE ; do
[ -r "$FILE" ] && continue
echo "${PKG%%.list}"
break
done < "$PKG"
done \
| xargs apt-get -y install --reinstall
It will look at your installed packages to see what files should be installed, then reinstall any packages for which files are missing.
dpkg --get-selections | awk '$2 == "install" { print $1 }' | xargs apt-get -y --reinstall install
dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | cut -f1 | xargs dpkg --purge
The COLUMNS EnvironmentVariable controls the width of dpkg(1)'s output, and thus how much of the package names gets chopped off. Note its behaviour differs depending on whether stdout is a terminal or not. Eg.:
COLUMNS=160 dpkg -l 'lib*' | awk '{print $1,$2}'
While the following page has some good tips, it seems to have been written by someone who not only thought that they should be able to instantly know every nuance of a piece of software without reading a manual or anything like that, but needed to take a few CTFD pills before writing this page. That said, it's mildly amusing and has a few good points.
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/wxinmfpl/debian.html
The main cause of this person's problems was mixing packages from stable and testing. One of the best features about DebianLinux is that (in stable, at least) the debian packages work very well with the other packages in the distribution. They've been tested lots, and spent a lot of time having only bug-fixes applied. With Testing or Unstable, it is likely that the developers and users building and using packages are using packages from the same repository. Often packages from testing may not work very well with an older library from stable, but the package doesn't have the required dependency on a newer version, simply because the DebianLinux maintainer doesn't know that the program misbehaves. If someone reports it as a bug, then the package will probably get the required dependency. But if very few people mix-n-match packages from stable and testing, all these little problems won't be discovered and resolved.
Moral: if you use testing or unstable, don't keep old versions of packages around while only upgrading some of them.
This is not a process to be taken lightly. It will probably be faster, safer and easier to just do a complete reinstall.
Steps:
You may find yourself in a situation which you have an old linker that won't let you uninstall a relatively new libc6. The solution to this problem is to reverse the changes in /etc/apt/sources.list, get a new linker, get an old libc6, then get an old linker.
If you use kernel packages, you can configure the machine to run a postinstall/postremove script. This is normally taken care of during system install time (if you install a machine with GRUB, then update-grub is run after kernel install/remove), but if you change bootloaders, it may not be.
Look in /etc/kernel-img.conf (create it if it doesn't exist), and set the postinst_hook and postrm_hook values accordingly.
postinst_hook=/sbin/update-grub postrm_hook=/sbin/update-grub
If you run 'make-kpkg modules_image', make-kpkg(1) will go through /usr/src/modules and build modules .debs for all the subdirectories of Debian-build-able modules you have in there.
Assuming you have the appropriate tools installed (bridge-utils), you just need to add a stanza like the following to /etc/network/interfaces:
auto br0 iface br0 inet static address 10.66.100.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 10.66.100.254 bridge-ports eth0 eth1
Note that you should not have a separate stanza for eth0 and eth1.
If you create logical partitions then a extended partition will be automatically created to house it. Don't worry! :)
The default debian 386 kernel package doesn't have bigmem support. Try installing a more specific image, eg 686 (in the 'kernel-image-2.6-686' package).
Kenshi Muto has built a Sarge debian-installer CD based on the 2.6.15 kernel. It might be what you need. Otherwise, install onto an IDE disk and move your installation.
There are several books available to teach you about Debian.
In addition to this page, you should also take a look at
4 pages link to DebianNotes:
Debian