Debian 4 (Etch) Installation screenshots
This is the first part of the Debian Installation tutorial I am planning to write, in this part,
is the installation itself based on screenshots, the next part will be the description about
installing the servers, WEB, Email, MySQL, DNS...
This installation was made from the net-install CD of the Debian Etch
Step # 1
Download the CD image from here
Step # 2
Burn the ISO into a CD
Step # 3

Press ENTER

Select the language for the Installation

Choose your country

Choose your keyboard layout

Put the name you want your server have, here you should take care, that if this is going to be
your email server, it should have the name your email server will have.
i.e. If your email server will be: mail.yourdomain.com this server should have mail as its name.
Select your domain, once again you should ask your system Administrator, or consider the name
your email server will have

Choose if you want to configure your partitions with the help of the wizard or want to do it,
by yourself, usually the use of the wizard is ok.

Select the partition you want to apply

If you selected the guided partitioning here you have to choose if you want all files in one
partition or if you prefer, separate /home only or to have separted /home, /var, /usr and /tmp
To have /home separated could be good if you plan to reinstall later, this way you can mount the
/home partition on the new installation, (be aware of the permissions). Here I choose to have all together,
later I can backup all the server ;)

Select finish partition and write changes to the disk, if you agree with the info displayed, otherwise
select go back, and change the configuration of the disk.
Your last change to go back and change the partition, after this step, the info that could still
be in your disk will be completely erased
Enter and re-enter the password for root, be sure you use a real good password, use letters, numbers, and
also special characters
Enter your name or the name for the first user you want to create, later you can create others,
with the adduser command

Enter the username for that first user


Enter the password for that user, twice.

If you are connected to the Internet (and better if you are if you are using the net-Install CD), choose to use a
network mirror
Select your country, or where you may find a nearest mirror to download the packages
Select the mirror you want to use, you can always change this, by editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list
Select the proxy you may need to connect to the Internet if any exists, you can
later change this settings by editing the file /etc/apt/apt.conf
Here, you choose if you want to participate in the package usage survey, this way the
Debian developers will know which packages you use, and will improve Debian for the use of that
ones. This is a complete personal desition, you can see the results of the survey at: Popularity Contest
webpage.

Select the packages you want to install, from the internet, (can take lot of time depending on
your Internet speed)
Grub installation, If Debian detected other OS (i.e. Windows) here will give you the
option of make a dual boot system
We are done!, you can select continue and the system will reboot, with Debian Etch installed
Here is how your Debian may look, after the installation if you have selected to install
the Desktop enviroment, the default one is Gnome, if you want to use KDE, or XFCE or any other,
you better choose not to install Desktop Enviroment, and then install with apt-get command,
and change the /etc/inittab file to boot in the graphical enviroment.
End of part one, I will post part two in the next days, and will provide the link, here
so keep comming.
If this was useful for you, please consider making a donation, any amount is welcome, please proceed by clicking on the yellow donate button, thank you in advance.


















You wrote:
Now for what you want to do you will have to reinstall everything but this time create a big extended partition (The whole disk) and then create different logical partitions one for every distro and one for the swap for all of them.
Interesting.
I'll try this, thanx. I hope it is better to create all partitions one primary and one big extended from windows, not from linux, and then after windows is installed I can split up the extended partition as I like. Avoiding any swap partition.
I also feel it is better to make a swapfile than a swap partition, since debian can at least on my system get a problem if the swap partition, (don't know if primary or extended) can get a problem and the hard disk says
"hard disk failure hda 13 non existent".
ioe failed opcode was unknown end request:I/O error, dev hda, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device hda, logical block 0
/dev/hda13 does not exist
Alert /dev/hda13 does not exist
Drive Status error Bad CRC
Drive Ready Seek complete Error
Primary master hard disk fail
Hard disk(s) Diagnosis fail
Press F1 to continue
This happens after resizing partitions, in between the resized partition there can be unallocated free space and that is unacceptable.
Again thank you and I hope you like my official blog, and my microblog.
lordbyte-whitfield.blog.de
twitter.com/Gulbrands3n
Best regards
Morten