Etch Preinstallation Questions
 

Should work fine. Your 'FAT32 formatting' will (presumably) be overwritten with ext3 or something during the install. / = 9GB, swap = 256MB, /home = whatever you want. Writing Grub to the MBR will be effortless and will work.

Thanks for the reply. I should also note, I will be on a home network using a Linksys router with an ethernet cable (with the DHCP on). I was planning on using ext3, since it seemed the most straightforward choice.

Didn't mention it before, but I'll be using one of the daily builds to install etch. Not sure if that would affect any advice. I'm both a little excited and a little nervous. I've only been using live cds previously. It's nice to have a spare computer to play around with.

Hi,

This is a very sensible move to use the daily build
to install etch. I made the mistake myself to rely on
an older cd to try install, which failed, without my
knowing why.
Go ahead, it's now perfectly usable. Xorg installs with
no problems whatsoever and your current set up should be
fine.

cheers

Well, I'm on Etch right now. I won't say it went off without a hitch. When I installed, there was no option to let me set root password, so I had to boot to the installer again in rescue mode and I was able to open a root shell and change the password. Installing apps with aptitude was pretty easy. I loaded icewm with xdm and xfe. Firefox seems very slow on my system. I also have a problem with xfe. It gives an error mounting /dev/.static/dev. I searched the web and found a partial solution with chmod, but whenever I log out and in, I have to do it again. This is going to be challenging.

Hmmm! Never heard of it failing to set the root password. Using the daily cvs can be a bit challenging. I usually use whatever beta is available.

Let me make a really radical suggestion, which you will probably want to discard immediately, and that's OK. You seem to be interested in setting up a really lean & mean system. You've learned quite a bit already in the installation ... Why not do it again? I usually tell my newbie friends that they should plan to install two or three times until they get comfortable with the process.

Post #32, on this thread describes the setup of a system like the one you want. Dead Parrot wrote it, and he is widely considered to be one of the top Debian experts on these forums.

As I said, it's advice that doesn't need to be followed, but don't hesitate to do it if things get too hairy.

I had to smile reading your post. I have Dead Parrot's post already bookmarked. I wanted to try icewm, and I couldn't find midnight commander with aptitude, but other wise that's what I was doing. I am not opposed to reinstalling at all. I wondered if that was really a big deal to do or not. I was also interested in trying out a partition scheme noted in another thread - putting a seperate /var partition next to the swap and creating symlinking /tmp to it. Found here. If I do reinstall, how should I handle GRUB? Do I need to reinstall it, or leave it alone? Any other possible pitfalls?

If you reinstall, GRUB will be re-installed as well

RAM might be a little low...

You might consider having 512MB on your system.

The Intel graphics sytem is actually a good thing if you are thinking of going with XGL.

By the way, I am writing this on a Dell C640 laptop running Debian Etch, using an Atheros 5212 PCMCIA Wireless G card running the win drivers through ndiswrapper and utilizing WPA encryption through wpa_supplicant.

Graphics, sound and wifi are the hardest things to set up in Etch. Once you have that in the bag, it's easy.

Also, I recommend that you get kernel 2.6.17 from Sid. I think that's the kernel they're aiming at having when Etch becomes stable, and it reportedly has much improved wireless handling among other things.