Debian on Dell Inspiron

Table of Contents

Dell Inspiron first impressions

It's thin and light. The keyboard is cheesy. Many laptops boot up when they are opened. Nothing happened when I opened the Dell laptop. I plugged in the power cable; still nothing. Finally I found the power button hidden in the front right corner, made of the same plastic and the same color as the rest of the case. It powers up, boots into Windows and asks for a password.

I keep notes on what I do, but here I record only what I did that worked. I thought getting it to boot from a USB EPROM "thumb drive" would be a problem, but it was a one day problem. Hold F2 or F12 at power-on until the Dell logo is onscreen and then it goes to boot ROM menus. I was worried about UEFI (Uniform Firmware Interface), thinking it might demand a password. Now I think that's just a new name for BIOS, the passwords are elsewhere.

UEFI Boot mode is set to UEFI; Secure boot: OFF; fTPM is ON

It's not trying to prevent booting a different OS, just to prevent reading the previous owner's data, which is auto-encrypted when written to disk.

My notes skimp on details here, but I remember it asked for a name and I could not type the name I wanted. I couldn't enter a slash. That turns out to be a "feature"; it did not want a pathname, it wanted an human-readable identifier, the pathname is hardcoded. Choose a device from a list of numbers, parentheses, and 0xdeadbeef.

Install Debian

From a USB thumb drive EPROM I boot debian-11.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso, which is supposed to fetch packages to install from the internet, but it can't find the internet. I get a minimal install. It boots to a bash prompt, without any window system, and without emacs. How can I read PDF files without a Graphic Interface? How can I fix things without an editor?

From #fdisk -l   I learn that the internal hard drive is called /dev/mmcblk0. The USB EPROM is called /dev/sda. Check that before you 

    #mkdir /media/thumb
    #mount /dev/sda1 /media/thumb
That worked for me, but it comes with no warranty. Another useful program that comes in the minimal install is lspci. I haven't tried to use it yet, but it looks like it also has gcc.

I want to install emacs with no X window system.

I download emacs-nox_27.1+1-3.1_amd64.deb from https://packages.debian.org/stable/ and copy it to the thumb drive, and then to the Dell.,

It refuses to install, because something else needs to be installed first. Fetch. Copy. Repeat. Here is the list that finally suffices:

emacs-common_27.1+1-3.1_all.deb, install-info_6.7.0.dfsg.2-6_amd64.deb, emacs-el_27.1+1-3.1_all.deb, emacs-bin-common_27.1+1-3.1_amd64.deb, libgpm2_1.20.7-8_amd64.deb, liblcms2-2_2.12~rc1-2_amd64.deb, liblcms2-utils_2.12~rc1-2_amd64.deb, libxml2_2.9.10+dfsg-6.7+deb11u2_amd64.deb, emacsen-common_3.0.4_all.deb, libicu67_67.1-7_amd64.deb, libasound2_1.2.4-1.1_amd64.deb, libasound2-data_1.2.4-1.1_all.deb
Really? I need to install two sound packages to run a text editor?

In other news, this shows up in dmesg during the boot process: 

  usb 1-2: firmware: failed to load ar3k/AthrBT_0x31010100.dfu (-2)
  firmware_class: See https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing firmware
Firmware without available source code can not be in the Debian system for political reasons. It's nice that the error message tells how to fix it. I fetch and install 
  dpkg -i firmware-atheros_20210315-3_all.deb
Now dmesg says 
  firmware: direct-loading firmware ar3k/AthrBT_0x31010100.dfu
  firmware: direct-loading firmware ar3k/ramps_0x31010100_40.dfu
but I still can't see the wireless router. If I could figure out where to put those files so that the Debian installer could find them, I might just start over and try to do a network install again. But that would take all day to install a big load of stuff I don't need (at least I don't need it on this machine).

Keyboard locks up

Finally I have downloaded all required packages and can install emacs-nox. The first time I try it, it seems to work, but locks up when trying to save and exit. Reboot. Now it works. I type very carefully. I edit and save a file.

It's not an emacs problem Typing Fn-s locks up everything, even at shell prompt. I don't know how to get out of "dead" mode, except by re-boot. Ctrl-Alt-delete still works to re-boot.

By random typing I discover that ctrl-\ wakes it up at bash prompt but not while in emacs.

Using apt_offline to download

There is a program called apt_offline, which is designed to aid downloading Debian packages to a computer with no internet connection. I will write on# to mark commands executed on the computer with an internet connection (online), and off# to mark commands on the computer with no connection (offline). If the same filename is used on both, it implies that a USB thumb drive was used to copy from one machine to the other. The package depends upon python; python3 was already installed, but I had to install some "magic". No idea what that is. 
on#  apt-get install apt-offline
off# dpkg -i python3-magic_0.4.20-3_all.deb
off# dpkg -i apt-offline_1.8.2-2_all.deb
Packages in *.deb format can be downloaded one at a time from the Debian website, but I don't want to do it one at a time.

Now I try to install evince, which is a PDF reader. I'm hoping it will depend upon, and therefore also install, as much as it needs of the X window system. 

off# apt-offline set apt-offline.sig
on#  apt-offline get --bundle apt-offline-bundle.zip apt-offline.sig
off# apt-offline install apt-offline-bundle.zip
ERROR: Path for keyring is invalid: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg
Some random web page suggests that the bad path is a bug in version 1.8.2. and that version 1.8.4 works better. It only exists in Debian testing (codename bullseye), fetch install and run anyway it seems to work, but still 
apt-offline set evince-offline.sig --install-packages evince
E: Unable to locate package evince
Now I discover something that the How-To-s, man pages, and tutorials do not seem to mention. The contents of /etc/apt/sources.list on the offline machine are important. That makes sense, communication is through thumb drive, but the sources of information should be the same as if the offline computer were connected. I added these lines to 
off# diff /etc/apt/sources.list sources.list.bak

< # add the following line -- KW 2022-08-06
< deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian bullseye main

off# apt-offline set apt-offline.sig --update
on#  apt-offline get --bundle apt-offline-bundle.zip apt-offline.sig
This time it runs for while and fetches more stuff. Unfortunately, while it is running it displays flashing progress bars but does not seem to create a log of actions and errors. It still does not work to install evince.

To be continued...

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