[LUNI] Debian Distributions

[Martin Maney]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 07:06:21PM -0600, Sten wrote:
> On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 17:47, Michael J McGonagle wrote:
> > wanted to check it out. I would appear that there are no ISO CD images
> > for the distribution. It looks as if the have their base system on
> > floppy images. I also looked on several of the mirrors, but no ISO
> > images.
> > 
> > Ok, so maybe I am not finding what I am looking for, and if that is the
> > case, can you point my tired brain cell in the correct direction?
> > Thanks...
>
> There most certainly are, just not that I've seen on Debain's website. A
> good place to start is www.linuxiso.org.

I would like to suggest something completely different.  If you have net
access that makes downloading an ISO image a reasonable undertaking, you
really ought to consider installing over the net.  Instead of sucking down
nigh unto 2 GB of stuff, most of which you'll never use, you can get started
with a few floppy images.  That will boot up and let you configure the
network so that you can fetch the 15MB (or so) base tarball and install it. 
Then you get the rest of the packages as you need them (well, the default
"standard" selections will make one more batch of maybe 20 or 30 MB).  In
the end, you may fetch as much as a couple hundred MB, although that's a lot
of gzipped binary packages IME.  It's still only a small fraction of the
bandwidth you'd use, mostly for no purpose, sucking down the ISO images.

Now, if you have a nice fast connection, but it's not where the machine(s)
you want to install on are, burning CDs may make sense.  But doing so just
because you want to install a bunch of machines doens't make such a good
case, because there is apt-move.  This tool makes it pretty easy to copy the
packages you've actually used into a local, partial mirror: setup a web
server that allows HTTP access to that tree and you can do the rest of the
installs at LAN speeds, at least for packages that have been copied to the
mirror tree.  The version of apt-move that's in potato is a bit of a hack,
and doesn't seem to handle the security updates, but otherwise this works
really slickly.

[The mirror on the machine I keep potato's apt-move tree on here reports
almost 400MB.  That's a mirror that has had packages from all the boxes here
copied into it, so it covers packages for both servers and workstations, and
a pretty good number of things that were installed, looked at, and
dismissed.  Even so, that's a good deal less than even one ISO image.]

I used to think that installing Slackware from a CD in an already-configured
machine was 'way cool (this was back when CDs weren't yet part of the
de-facto standard, bare-bones PC configuration), but it was crude and
awkward compared to Debian's support for over the wire installs.

Hmmmm.  Or does the potato install require a more local copy of the base
tarball?  I know testing/woody and unstable can go from a handfull of
floppies straight to a web-based install becasue I've done that recently. 
(BTW, the new set of bootdisks - *.*.17 IIRC - that was released a week or
so ago worked beautifully for me when I decided to replace unstable with
woody on one box.)  I haven't installed potato on anything in rather a
while, now...

-- 
Self-pity is like sitting there and peeing your pants:
at first, it's warm and comfy, but pretty soon it gets cold
and then it starts to stink.  - anonymous, as is traditional