Here's a road map for the steps you will take during the installation process.
Before you start, make sure to back up every file that is now on your system. If this is the first time a non-native operating system has been installed on your computer, it's quite likely you will need to re-partition your disk to make room for Debian GNU/Linux. Anytime you partition your disk, you should count on losing everything on the disk, no matter what program you use to do it. The programs used in installation are quite reliable and most have seen years of use; but they are also quite powerful and a false move can cost you. Even after backing up be careful and think about your answers and actions. Two minutes of thinking can save hours of unnecessary work.
If you are creating a multi-boot system, make sure that you have the distribution media of any other present operating systems on hand. Especially if you repartition your boot drive, you might find that you have to reinstall your operating system's boot loader, or in many cases the whole operating system itself and all files on the affected partitions.
install.en.txtinstall.en.htmlinstall.en.pdfdselect Tutorialdselect program. This is one means of
installing addition packages onto your system after the basic install is
complete.
Device Drivers and Installation CommandsLinux for S/390Linux for IBM eServer zSeries and S/390: Distributionsfdasd.txt.../current/md5sum.txtmd5sum program, you can ensure that your files are not corrupt by
running md5sum -v -c md5sum.txt.
Hardware information can be gathered from:
Hardware Information Needed for an Install
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Hardware| Information You Might Need |
|--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
|DASD | * Device number(s). |
| | * Available free space. |
|--------+----------------------------------------------------------|
|Network | * Type of adapter. |
| | * Device numbers. |
| | * Relative adapter number for OSA cards. |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Many brand name products work without trouble on Linux. Moreover, hardware for Linux is improving daily. However, Linux still does not run as many different types of hardware as some operating systems.
You can check hardware compatibility by:
If your computer is connected to a network 24 hours a day (i.e., an Ethernet or equivalent connection — not a PPP connection), you should ask your network's system administrator for this information.
It is important to decide what type of machine you are creating. This will determine the disk space requirements for your Debian system.
Once you have gathered information about your computer's hardware, check that your hardware will let you do the type of installation that you want to do.
Here is a sampling of some common Debian system configurations. You can also get an idea of the disk space used by related groups of programs by referring to Disk Space Needed for Tasks, Section 11.4.
Remember that these sizes don't include all the other materials which are
usually to be found, such as user files, mail, and data. It is always best to
be generous when considering the space for your own files and data. Notably,
the Debian /var partition contains a lot of state information.
The dpkg files (with information on all installed packages) can
easily consume 20MB; with logs and the rest, you should usually allocate at
least 50MB for /var.
Partitioning your disk simply refers to the act of breaking up your disk into sections. Each section is then independent of the others. It's roughly equivalent to putting up walls in a house; if you add furniture to one room it doesn't affect any other room.
Whenever this section talks about ``disks'' you should translate this into a DASD or VM minidisk in the S/390 world. Also a machine means an LPAR or VM guest in this case.
If you already have an operating system on your system (VM, z/OS, OS/390, …) and want to stick Linux on the same disk, you will need to repartition the disk. Debian requires its own hard disk partitions. It cannot be installed on Windows or MacOS partitions. It may be able to share some partitions with other Linux systems, but that's not covered here. At the very least you will need a dedicated partition for the Debian root.
You can find information about your current partition setup by using a partitioning tool for your current operating system , such as the VM diskmap . Partitioning tools always provide a way to show existing partitions without making changes.
In general, changing a partition with a file system already on it will destroy any information there. Thus you should always make backups before doing any repartitioning. Using the analogy of the house, you would probably want to move all the furniture out of the way before moving a wall or you risk destroying it.
If your computer has more than one hard disk, you may want to dedicate one of the hard disks completely to Debian. If so, you don't need to partition that disk before booting the installation system; the installer's included partitioning program can handle the job nicely.
If your machine has only one hard disk, and you would like to completely replace the current operating system with Debian GNU/Linux, you also can wait to partition as part of the installation process (Partitioning for Debian, Chapter 6), after you have booted the installation system. However this only works if you plan to boot the installer system from tapes, CD-ROM or files on a connected machine. Consider: if you boot from files placed on the hard disk, and then partition that same hard disk within the installation system, thus erasing the boot files, you'd better hope the installation is successful the first time around. At the least in this case, you should have some alternate means of reviving your machine like the original system's installation tapes or CDs.
If your machine already has multiple partitions, and enough space can be provided by deleting and replacing one or more of them, then you too can wait and use the Debian installer's partitioning program. You should still read through the material below, because there may be special circumstances like the order of the existing partitions within the partition map, that force you to partition before installing anyway.
In all other cases, you'll need to partition your hard disk before starting the installation to create partition-able space for Debian. If some of the partitions will be owned by other operating systems, you should create those partitions using native operating system partitioning programs. We recommend that you do not attempt to create Debian Linux partitions using another operating system's tools. Instead, you should just create the native operating system's partitions you will want to retain.
If you are going to install more than one operating system on the same machine, you should install all other system(s) before proceeding with Linux installation. Windows and other OS installations may destroy your ability to start Linux, or encourage you to reformat non-native partitions.
You can recover from these actions or avoid them, but installing the native system first saves you trouble.
If you currently have one hard disk with one partition (a common setup for desktop computers), and you want to multi-boot the native operating system and Debian, you will need to:
This section will walk you through pre-installation hardware setup, if any, that you will need to do prior to installing Debian. Generally, this involves checking and possibly changing firmware settings for your system. The ``firmware'' is the core software used by the hardware; it is most critically invoked during the bootstrap process (after power-up). Known hardware issues affecting the reliability of Debian GNU/Linux on your system are also highlighted.
In order to install Debian GNU/Linux on a S/390 or zSeries machine you have first boot a kernel into the system. The boot mechanism of this platform is inherently different to other ones, especially from PC-like systems: there are no floppy devices available at all. Based on historical grounds, however, the software package assisting you in this process has yet the name boot-floppies do not let you fool by that. You will notice an other big difference while you work with this platform: most (if not all) of the time you will work remote, with the help of some client session software like telnet, or a browser. This is due to that special system architecture where the 3215/3270 console is line-based instead of character-based.
Linux on this platform runs either natively on the bare machine, in a so-called LPAR (Logical Partition) or in a virtual machine supplied by the VM system. You can use a boot tape on all of those systems; you may use some other boot media, too, but those may not be generally available. For example, you can use the virtual card reader of a virtual machine, or boot from the HMC (Hardware Management Console) of an LPAR if the HMC and this option is available for you.
Before you actually perform an installation, you have to go over some design and preparation steps. IBM has made documentation available about the whole process, e.g. how to prepare an installation medium and how actually boot from that medium. Duplicating that information here is neither possible nor necessary. However, we will describe here which kind of Debian-specific data is needed and where do you find them. Based on both sources of information you have to prepare your machine and the installation medium and to perform a boot from it. When you see the welcome message in your client session join this document again for the Debian-specific installation steps.
Please refer to chapter 5 of the Linux for
S/390 Redbook and chapter 3.2 of the Linux for
IBM eServer zSeries and S/390: Distributions Redbook on how to set
up an LPAR for Linux.
Please refer to chapter 6 of the Linux for
S/390 Redbook and chapter 3.1 of the Linux for
IBM eServer zSeries and S/390: Distributions Redbook on how to set
up a VM guest for running Linux.
You need to copy all the files from the vmrdr sub-directory to
your CMS disk. Be sure to transfer kernel.debian and
initrd.debian in binary mode with a fixed record length of 80
characters.
If you don't have a connection to the Internet (either directly or via a web proxy) you need to create a local installation server that can be accessed from your S/390. This server keeps all the packages you want to install and must make them available using NFS, HTTP or FTP.
The installation server needs to copy the exact directory structure from any Debian GNU/Linux mirror but of only the s390 and architecture-independent files are required. You can also copy the contents of all installation CDs into such a directory tree.
FIXME: more information needed - from a Redbook?
Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 For S/390
version 3.0.23, 16 May, 2002