Software installation is not always a trivial task

Transcription

1 Notes on Installation of Debian Operating System Minjie Chen First draft: February 8, 2013 Revised: December 5, 2013 Disclaimer: This text serves exclusively as a technical protocol for private usage, the author of this document shall not be held responsible for the consequences of any actions on any devices and, particularly, data loss due to operations of this kind. Software installation is not always a trivial task as it should be. Operating systems belong to a special category of software. An operating system takes control of all the components of a computer system, known as devices, and offers thus the user programs (also called application s) with a bridging interface to the underlying hardware. A clean and complete installation of an operating system on the target machine is therefore essential. Debian Linux [6] is an operating system published under the GNU General Public License [3] with Linux [4] as its system kernel. 1 Debian 6 Here we go over the installation process of CUDA [1] on a Debian operating system (code name: squeeze ). This process assumes naturally a successful installation of the operating system first. Our target machine has an AMD64 (also called x86-64 ) CPU architecture and is equipped with an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT graphics processing unit [5], which is now outdated and unfortunately not fully supported by the graphics driver nouveau delivered in the Debian system. The method we use here is the so-called Nvidiaway, for installation in the Debian-way, please consult [8]. Step -1 Though not mandatory, it is highly recommended to have a look of the Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide [7]. In case there is a separate Linux operating system on the target machine, we should keep a record of its /etc/fstab file. Step 0a Download the Debian installation images and burn them into DVDs. For the current task, only the first two DVDs will be needed. It could save substantial trouble later in the installation if we check here whether the DVD images have been burnt correctly. 1 We retrieve the size information of the image file $ /sbin/isosize -x /dev/scd0 2 sector count: , sector size: 2048 Alternatively, we may retrieve more detailed information by $ isoinfo -d -i /dev/scd0 CD-ROM is in ISO 9660 format Logical block size is: 2048 Volume size is: Then we direct the exact many bits written to the optical media 3 to the program for the computation of MD5 sum 1 Theoretically speaking, we may also need to check the data integrity of the downloaded image files before burning them into DVDs. 2 A note of typography: The input command in this text is always contained in a single line, that is, without line break. 3 This is due to that the size of the file (or block device) holding an ISO9660 file system can be marginally larger than 1

2 $ dd if=/dev/scd0 count= bs=2048 md5sum records in records out bytes (4.7 GB) copied085d9c7ffca23a64942f4a1aeaa The output should be identical with the official sum. Step 0b Download the Nvidia driver from the official web page Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us, the latest (as of February 8, 2013) supporting driver is NVIDIA-Linux-x86_ run. Download from nvidia.com/cuda-downloads the CUDA Toolkit for Ubuntu 10.04: cuda_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu run. The version for Ubuntu is not supported on Debian Step 1 Run the Debian installer and start the installation in expert mode (first select menu item Advanced Options ). We should keep a record of the partition device labels of the secondary operating system, if any, and if they are renamed in the process of partitioning of hard drive(s). In this case, /etc/fstab of the secondary system will have to be manually re-configured, 4 cf. Step -1. Also be reminded that the number of partitions on a SATA hard drive is limited to fifteen (the error message of the Debian installer may be slightly shadowy in this respect). Select the first kernel option. Install the base system without graphical desktop. the actual size of the ISO9660 file system. One reason for this is that CD writers are allowed to add run out sectors at the end of an ISO9660 image. See the manual page of isosize. 4 Since Debian 6, mount points in /etc/stab have been replaced by UUID identifiers which are generated automatically by file system utilities (mkfs etc.), so there will be no need for a manual modification. Step 2 When the Debian installation is completed, do not reboot the system directly, 5 since we need to block the nouveau driver first, this can be achieved by adding a minimal configuration file /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nouveau.conf to the Debian with the following content blacklist nouveau options nouveau modeset=0 after booting into recovery mode. Alternatively, this task can be carried out on the secondary system (after mounting the corresponding partition of the new system). Step 3 Reboot (again) into recovery mode. Install the following packages (as superuser) # apt-get install build-essential # apt-get install linux-headers-$( uname -r) # apt-get install xorg Install GNOME or/and KDE, core (or the full package) # apt-get install gnome-core Install the GNOME display manager # apt-get install gdm3 Remove the nouveau driver completely # apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau Check the status of display manager # /etc/init.d/gdm3 status should it be running, # /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop 5 In our case, due to incompatibility of the nouveau driver, the X server is not functional after booting. As documented in [7], we can blacklist this module by passing the following boot parameter to the installer: nouveau.blacklist=yes (press Tab to edit the installation command), which will cause the (nouveau) module to be blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local both during the installation and for the installed system. 2

3 Step 4 Now compile the Nvidia graphics driver. First choose the correct compiler (the same compiler with which the kernel has been compiled) # export CC=gcc-4.3 Switch into the directory where the graphics driver is stored and run # sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_ run The compilation and installation should run smoothly. Now reboot. (Please note for security s sake, it is generally a bad idea to run startx as superuser.) Step 5 Now we install the CUDA Toolkit. 6 Switch into the directory where cuda_5.0.35_ linux_64_ubuntu run is stored and run $ sh cuda_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu run -extract=path where path must be an absolute path; three components will be extracted there: cudatoolkit_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu10.04.run, cuda-samples_5.0.35_linux.run and devdriver_5.0_linux_64_ run, the last one is a graphics driver of an earlier version and will not be used. cudatoolkit_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu10.04.run can be installed in the same way as in Step 4. Set the environment variable PATH and configure the program linkage option as directed by NVIDIA CUDA Getting Started Guide for Linux [2]. Step 6 Now install the example programs cuda-samples_ _linux.run. To verify the installation, switch into the directory where the CUDA example programs are stored. Run make to compile the programs and the resulted released binary executives. Two examples 6 In CUDA Toolkit 5.0 the Nvidia graphics driver has been integrated. Since the end user may not really need CUDA Toolkit, it is our intention to install the CUDA Toolkit separately. $./devicequery./devicequery Starting CUDA Device Query (Runtime API) version (CUDART static linking) Detected 1 CUDA Capable device(s) Device 0: "GeForce 9800 GT" CUDA Driver Version / Runtime Version 5.0 / 5.0 Compute Mode: < Default (multiple host threads can use ::cudasetdevice() with device simultaneously) > devicequery, CUDA Driver = CUDART, CUDA Driver Version = 5.0, CUDA Runtime Version = 5.0, NumDevs = 1, Device0 = GeForce 9800 GT $./bandwidthtest [CUDA Bandwidth Test] - Starting Running on Device 0: GeForce 9800 GT Quick Mode Host to Device Bandwidth, 1 Device(s) Device to Host Bandwidth, 1 Device(s) Device to Device Bandwidth, 1 Device(s) Debian 7 The installation of Debian 7 (code name: wheezy ) is roughly the same. In the tested case of Debian 3

4 7.2.0, the nouveau driver now offers a minimal support to the device. The Nvidia driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_ run requests to be compiled with gcc-4.6. Legacy programs often depend on 32-bit libraries to run. For Debian 6 this is relatively easy, we merely need to install the AMD64-package ia32-libs. Debian 7 introduced the multiarch support to install and run applications of multiple binary targets on the same system. This is a radical change. To ease package installation, we first have a look of the Debian repository. 2.1 Debian repository Roughly speaking, a Debian repository is a set of Debian packages organized in a special directory structure. Source media containing Debian packages for installation are managed by the file /etc/apt/sources.list. This file is automatically generated during the system installation and can be updated later on an installed system by # apt-cdrom add In the file/etc/apt/sources.list sources are listed in lines as various entries. For binary packages every entry line has the format deb [options] URI DIST [component] [] In case of source code packages, the command deb is replaced by deb-src. URI specifies the root directory of this repository in the Debian distribution versioned DIST. Some common URI types are: file, cdrom and http (ftp); in our case case DIST is obviously wheezy. components refer to the components in the package directory, these are usually main, contrib and non-free. option can be set to define the architecture information of the system: arch=arch1,arch2, On single architecture machines, this can be left unset. A typical entry line looks like deb cdrom:[debian GNU/Linux _Wheezy_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary :05]/ wheezy contrib main If we have an image file iso, we can access the repository at its corresponding mount point 7 deb file://path wheezy contrib main path is the absolute path to the mount point (that is, starting with /), its trailing slash is optional. 2.2 Multiarch support In Debian 7, the package ia32-libs has been replaced by ia32-libs-i386. This new package is not included in the AMD64-repositories. The solution proposed by Debian 7 is called multiarch support. First, we need to add the relevant 32-bit repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list, which have typically the form deb cdrom:[debian GNU/Linux _Wheezy_ - Official i386 DVD Binary :56]/ wheezy contrib main ia32-libs-i386 shows a complex package dependency, we need the first two DVDs. If we call $ dpkg --print-architecture the output should be amd64 which denotes the current system architecture. We now activate the i386- architecture by issuing the command # dpkg --add-architecture i386 This command can be reversed, if necessary, by # dpkg --remove-architecture i386 The output of $ dpkg --print-foreign-architectures should be i386, this is to report that the system is now configured to install packages of the foreign architecture i386. Before calling # apt-get update 7 To mount the image file iso, we shall issue the command: # mount -t iso9660 -o loop iso path. 4

5 to resynchronize the package index files from their sources specified in /etc/apt/sources.list, we need to set architecture option in the entries in /etc/apt/sources.list: add [arch=amd64] to every AMD64-repository and [arch=i386] to every i386-repository. 8 If we want to access the mirrored remote repositories, the entry may look like deb [arch=amd64,i386] wheezy main The installation of the 32-bit libraries shall proceed smoothly by # apt-get install ia32-libs The rather intelligent package handling tool apt-get will figure out that we are looking for the package in the 32-bit distribution ia32-libs-i References [1] home_new.html. [2] com/compute/cuda/5_0/rel/docs/cuda_ Getting_Started_Guide_For_Linux.pdf. [3] [4] [5] gt_de.html, hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-9800gt. [6] [7] amd64/. [8] NvidiaGraphicsDrivers. All URLs in the text retrieved February 8, The reason for this modification is that otherwise apt-get update will try to locate package indexes of all the foreign architectures when processing a certain repository (and logically, these packages are nonexistent in the current repository). This does not affect the entry of the HTTP-repository, since everything we need is contained in the same repository. 9 Behind this, it is the package ia32-libs-i386:i386 that will really be installed. The second i386 addresses the architecture of the package. 5