From the start

We Physically Identifiied network card and video card and wrote them down (although, in retrospect we could have done lspci and let Linux tell us what they were - lspci is much easier than opening up the computer).

We then went through the install process and chose various things including gdm. We guessed the screen refresh rates etc. We'll have to reconfigure this later. We chose mostly default options except for the network and video cards.

Apt-get is the cool app that lets you install stuff really easily. When you're configuring apt during the install, choose the CD. If, later, you want apt to pull packages off the internet, the easiest way is to run apt-setup as root and follow the options. The other way is to edit /etc/apt/sources.list. To find out what are the best online sources, install netselect and run netselect-apt. This will find out which servers are best for you and will write a sources list in whatever directory it is run from. If you want to change the source for apt, just copy this file into /etc/apt/sources.list and overwrite the old one.

Then we installed:

mysql-server phpmyadmin php4 php4-cgi phppgadmin php4-pgsql php4-mysql phplib

phpdoc postgresql ezpublish slocate (we ran slocate -u to update the locate database) icewm (this is a lite windows manager) Galeon (lite browser) Linuxconf Sud