Hello guys,

I have a great Slackware installation in my harddisk and thought I'll install Fedora 3 in some free space. Just then I got a Debian DVD from my friend and thought, what the heck, let's install this and see. Now I am greatly enlightened by this experience.....

First of all, the installation was very easy....I just used some partitions I had for storing data ...

I gave separate partitions for / , /boot and /home.

My Slackware also has the same config. I thought both can share a common swap area and set it so.

After the installation, debian failed to boot into X.... I tried configuring it for a hour, then thought I'll try using the nVidia drivers I have stored in my Slackware home partition....

I gave the command to mount the partition, but was suddenly given an error saying that the partition was not reiserfs... I was totally confused as I know that partition to be reiserfs. Sure enough, I reboot my system and I thought it'll be ok. But guess what, I was WRONG

My home partition was nuked... it was totally unrecognizable....I had to reformat it into reiserfs to even use it

All my downloads and important docs and config files are gone now

About 1.5 GB of data, downloads, apps, and a sizeable amount of lovingly collected pr0n pictures and clips are now nuked.......

This is a rant to let up my feelings.. now I am back in my trusty Slack to try to reconfigure my settings

And BTW, how to install a package in Debian.... I have a DVD full of software, but if I give say "# apt-get install emacs" it ways package not found... can u guys help out ???

Ensure that the package actually exists before attempting to download it.

Search for the package: http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
(or apt-cache search <package>)

In your case, 'apt-get install emacs21'

As for your lost documents.. always backup before messing around with partitions

try to use aptitude

debian:~# aptitude

if you want sid,
then rename testing/sarge/stable to "sid" in

debian:~# vi /etc/apt/sources.list

--

Well... the DVD is about 4 GB full, but if I try to install emacs or Kernel Sources it is pointing towards the http server ... saying no packages are available in the DVD. Are there any special way of doing this shit ???

Just now I downloaded about 35 MB of Kernel Sources only to get a notice from nvidia installer that the kernel source does not match the kernel

Totally confused....I thought debian installation was difficult, but adding packages was easy... but it is reverse in my case...

Do you have an entry for your DVD in /etc/apt/sources.list ? If not, I think that you can use apt-cdrom (apt-cdrom -d=your_DVD's_mount_point add) to add this entry. I haven't got DVD drive in my own system so I cannot be sure if this actually works.

Or you can mount the DVD, copy all packages to hard disk and use dpkg to install them. Check "dpkg -h" or "man dpkg" for help.

I used apt-setup to point the installation media as my cdrom and then only the http server/ It built an index for my cdrom for quite some time... but no use

If I just give the cd-rom only in the apt-setup, then I get no packages whatever...I cannot install anything, not even emacs21

And I installed Debian to check out apt-get, hearing how easy it was to use it

I'll try to directly point to the cd-rom as the previous poster asked to and see what happens...and post the results here.

Okay guys, don't worry...

I nuked Debian and installed Fedora 3

Now I'm back to normal.... as I have a good system with two working distros

Debian appears to be too difficult for some users. Next time you get the temptation to try Debian, I'd suggest that you start by reading some documentation that explains how apt-get works.

Anyway, the important thing is that you've now got a working GNU/Linux system that you like.

If you put both an http and a dvd entry in your source list, when you download a package, it will install the newest one(i.e. most likely from the http source). It would have helped to know how you were installing the packages, but mute point I guess.