My hdb drive was 1 giant vault at 60GB. 60GB is pretty "giant" to me.

This worked out pretty well. I was able to image my / partition easily and restore it when necessary, remember my maxim about it being broke: "smash it to pieces, brew the coffee, and have at it". Sometimes restoring an image was real handy.

Nonetheless I wanted /var and /tmp on their own partitions and I wanted 4 partitions on my slave (backup) drive. I also wanted to shrink-up my /home partition, directory. 56GB is too big for any one partition.

My new partitions:

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 155061 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         203      102280+  83  Linux  /boot
/dev/hda2             204        4539     2185344   83  Linux  /root
/dev/hda3            4540       11134     3323880    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda4           11135       31770    10400544   83  Linux  /home
/dev/hda5            4540        8899     2197408+  83  Linux  /var
/dev/hda6            8900       11134     1126408+  83  Linux  /tmp

Disk /dev/hdb: 60.0 GB, 60022480896 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7297 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1               1        3206    25752163+  83  Linux  /vault
/dev/hdb2            3207        4426     9799650   83  Linux  /docs
/dev/hdb3            4427        5296     6988275   83  Linux  /test
/dev/hdb4            5297        7297    16073032+  83  Linux  /music

So I had to start moving a lot of data around. I could have shortened my time if I used some of the extra 50GB on my hda as an extra temporary partition, instead it's just dead-space and it took hours to backup all my docs, music, data...I made lots of .tar files and used 4 dvd's for the job. When you're working on a task you certainly don't want to be held up by "size constraints" so I ended up deleting a lot of the proggys that I had downloaded. My "downloads" folder, and subsequent directories, was better than 3GB's by itself. rm -rf directory. Yeah, that's more like it.

It took hours to save my precious data. But it was no sweat to re-scheme my partitions. I booted to that System Rescue Disc (yessir, or course I use it), and at the prompt:   run_qtparted. Like some geek, wannabe surgeon I was hacking away at...well, nothing really. Aren't computers pretty intangible. That's when you really feel like a loser - "what the hell am I doing sitting here playing with this keyboard?? I could be surfing with Tucker for chrissakes!!"

After I re-schemed (is that even a word?) my partitions I booted to the Debian Net Installer disc. Installed in seconds. Well, OK...minutes, and I was back after a reboot. Having no DHCP from Verizon (thanks, fellas) I became root after logging in and ran pppoeconf. Moments later I was online so I opened my sources.list and added some repositories. Usually around now I tell those leaving Windows far behind for the computing arena of Linux to run base-config at this point, but I don't want any KDE stuff or unnecessary packages installed on my machine this time. Instead of that I became more surgical. The first thing I installed was gnome-core.

Following I installed:

build-essential checkinstall zip prelink hdparm alsa-base alsa-utils alsa-oss

After I installed alsa-conf I ran alsaconf to set my card up. I also Nano'd into the prelink config file and enabled it just in case I forgot to later. It's terrific being at the prompt instead of doing all this in X. Alas, I wanted a pretty GUI so the next thing I installed was x-window-system, and I'd like to print, so I installed cups the foomatics, and hplip. I don't use hpoj anymore.

I also knew that I'd be installing the nVIDIA 3d accelleration driver so I went right to installing the kernel-source and build packages, as well as the K7 kernel for my AthlonXP box. Next I mounted the partition that I made for and moved my software to. I installed the nVIDIA driver, loaded the module and modified XF86Config-4.

Next I installed gdm mozplugger gstreamer0.8-plugins w32codecs and the rest of the multimedia stuff. Then I rebooted.

Joy of joy's I am at my fresh, shiny new Debian box login prompt. After logging in I went to mod or otherwise tweak some config files system wide. I installed Webmin for later use and a few other things I quickly remembered. Then I fired up Synaptic. I noticed I had 560 packages installed. Cool, nice little number but my desktop setup wasn't complete so i went to it: installing.

I am writing this in gedit from a pretty good Debian system with 760 packages installed. I have all the programs I think I need but I am sure during the next day or 4 that I will have installed more stuff. Right now I think of scite and scribus. There will be more. This is my current-desktop.

[READ:] You've gotta know I left all of the details out of this tiny article. If you're new to Linux, Debian in particular - there are many things that I did yesterday and many ways of doing things that I left out. You cannot expect to read this article and have a clue about building your Debian (Linux) system. This article is for those that are experienced so they can read it and reply with comments like:

d00d - you forgot...

or, you're an idiot - why did you do "x" that way?

or, WOW, machiner, you ROCK!

or, That's the way I do it, too!

OK - It's a few days later and my desktop is about complete. There are 832 (I added some fluff) currently installed appy's on my computer at this time and I gotta say It's running pretty well. I have also mounted the backup drive's partitions as "data=writeback" to get some improved performance. I'm noticing it, but was spooked at a freeze and subsequent reboot yesterday. No worries - and I was screwing around. It was a good decision for me to go with installing just Gnome and the programs I wanted instead of going through "base-config" that I recommend in my Debian installation tutorial. I still think Windows users evolving into Linux (like a "gateway" something) should take the "base-config" road so I'm not going to change my tutorial(s).

I was just reading an article on Slashdot, here that made me laugh...some of the comments about what Linux can or cannot do. Man, you can KEEP Windows!

machiner Fri 19 Aug 2005 08:25:28 AM EDT

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