I think it was Nietzche that said when we err, we err twice: once too much, and once too little.

I’ve read enough Nietzche to know he was a crackpot, but I’ll admit that for me, that statement is usually true. I have a tendency to do things twice.

But I have learned to take notes as I go though, and that usually lets me avoid the second error — the coming up short part.

Installing Debian and jumping to Squeeze was a good example. I muddled around with this program and that one, trying to get a setup I liked without poisoning the system too much.

Where I went wrong, I noted it, and where I went right, I noted it too.

For my own benefit, and because the purpose of this site is to serve as a reminder to myself (not to serve as entertainment for you, in spite of what you might think 😉 ), I’m going to share the steps I took.

• Install Debian Lenny via netboot CD. I understand that there are ways to install Squeeze directly, but to be honest, there are a few things that I prefer to do from Lenny. Additionally, I don’t always upgrade, and honestly, there’s very little in Squeeze that I need, that isn’t in Lenny too.
• Reboot and check the installation. An obvious step, but probably worth saying out loud. No harm in making sure it works right.
• Transplant the CF card. Lately I’ve been using the Mebius to piggyback for the Fujitsu, only because it has a CDROM, and the 120Mhz doesn’t. After it’s installed and appears to be working, I’m ready to downscale.
• Reboot, remove the old udev net rules, and reboot again. This sounds like I’m working with Windows. But I like to remove /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules because otherwise I have a ghost ethernet connection at eth0. I’d just as soon make it clean and fresh.
• Edit the sources list. I take out the source repositories and add contrib and non-free. I also add backports, but that’s just for my own convenience. I barely use it.
• Upgrade Lenny. Might as well make a stopover at the current version of Lenny. I like to think I’m avoiding any unsafe jumps from Lenny to Squeeze. That may well be.
• Add the Terminus font. I find it easier to configure the font at this point, because things seem to change in Squeeze. I’m probably just losing my place in the skip between them, but if I know the font is correct in Lenny, it works in Squeeze. Usually. (“Usually” means installing kbd and console-setup, which seems to do an okay job. Usually.)
• Edit the sources again, then jump to Squeeze. This is a big step at 120Mhz, and takes more than a day to complete. Part of that is just because the dialog windows are usually popping up while I’m asleep, and sit there for a few hours. One day I’ll figure out how to do an unattended upgrade.
• When that’s finally over, edit Grub. Like I mentioned yesterday.
• Blacklist the pcspkr module. I’d like to throttle the engineer who created the PC speaker.
• Trim out tty’s. I don’t need six. I really only need two or three, so the extras are really just taking up resources.
• Add openssh-client and nfs-common. If this were a server, I would probably stick to dropbear, just because it’s quite a bit smaller than openssh. Nfs makes it easy to move configuration files on to the machine.
• Add firmware-atheros and wireless-tools. This lets me use some of my faster wireless cards. I have one card that doesn’t need firmware or the wireless-tools package, but they’re a little slower. Not that it matters much. … 🙄
• Add the remainder of the software that I like. It’s pretty much the same stuff as was in my Crux system, sans a few oddball programs here or there. I should note that in order to use vimwiki, I have to install the full version of vim; by default I believe vim-tiny is used in Debian.

Putting up this page should help me avoid a third error in the future. Or at least the second error twice. 🙄