Configuring the Laptop with Debian

First step was to install Debian. I chose this because its package system makes it easy, plus Pebble is also a cut down Debian and thus it shares the same file layout and commands.

There are many guides to installing Debian, so I'll just highlight some of the strangeness I found and some decisions I made.

  • Three partitions: one for the OS, one for swap space, and then another for the squid proxy cache. Since the cache is the busy part of the system, I wanted to keep it separate in case it got currupted etc.
  • Because the laptop was using a Belkin PCMCIA network card that wasn't in the default distribution, this generated a little research and several installs. The end result was something like:
    • when prompted to install a 'net' device, choose 'dummy'. This will trigger the other network setup prompts. Alternatively you can hack the /etc/network/interfaces file directly if you prefer.
    • Immediately after booting the first time, use <alt><f2> to switch to another login. Login as root with no password required
    • follow these directions which amount to inserting the PCMCIA card info into /etc/pcmcia/config
    • edit /etc/network/interfaces and replace dummy0 with eth0. Issue the command ifdown dummy0
    • finally do a /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart
    • At this point, you should have a working network interface and be able to ping the outside world and be pinged by others. You can go back to the main console and continue with the rest of setup now that you have a working network connection.
  • There was still a problem with the network interface not coming up after reboot. A little googling found an answer which boiled down toremoving the 'auto' line from /etc/network/interfaces, and installing the 'hotplug' package.
  • Don't choose any options from task select. It just installs a bunch of stuff you won't need. I used dselect instead to install squid and just squid (none of the html config stuff).

Once you have it all installed and running, you can try to use it from another machine. For my subnet, I first tested by putting the laptop on the subnet and then logging in via ssh and making sure it could access the internet and generally work as expected.

When you're satisfied its working correctly, you're reading to configure squid.