Re: dumb question about jigdo and i386 and AMD 64 versions of Etch......
On Sat, Dec 16, 2006 at 08:31:26PM +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote:
>
> How much commonality exists between the i386 versions of Etch or Sarge and
> the AMD 64 version of Etch?
>
> Let me explain what I mean a little more.
>
> I have Sarge 3.1r4 on DVD. I also have Sarge 3.1r3 on CD. All of it.
>
> As I understand it I could use jigdo to sniff through the DVD iso images
> (or the CDs) and pull out common packages with the RC1 i386 version of Etch
> while simultaneously downloading packages from the Debian mirror sites to
> synthesise either DVD or CD images of the Etch distribution.....
>
> I am going to do this as an exercise to learn about jigdo and also to find
> the most efficient way of downloading a full distribution from the mirror
> sites.
>
> I use a number of computers that are not connected to the internet so I
> need CDs and DVDs. But I want to become proficient enough with jigdo to
> reduce the antisocial load that I might place on the servers. This
> important to me.
>
> I have been looking at a barebones box made by Novatech that is pretty
> cheap and contains an AMD 3000 Sempron chip and some RAM and an on board
> graphics card.
>
> I might buy this box and add a DVD drive and a 40GB drive to it. You guys
> can lobby for extra RAM or other features that I should add to it or even
> that I should go for an AMD Athlon 64 chip instead. I am open to
> suggestions on this.
>
> But the point is that as far as I understand it either an AMD Sempron 3000
> chip or AMD Athlon 64 chip would run a 64 bit OS i.e. the Etch AMD64
> version of the Debian OS.
>
> Correct me if I am wrong.
>
> If I wanted to make DVDs or CDs of the whole AMD64 Etch distribution would
> there be enough overlap of identical files between Sarge 3.1 i386 and the
> Etch AMD 64 bit distribution (or indeed the i386 version of Etch itself) to
> justify using it as a template for jigdo speed up the AMD64 bit download?
>
> Comments appreciated.
>
> By the way, here is the spec on the proposed AMD Sempron 3000 barebones box:
Hi Michael.
Re difference between Etch i386 and Etch amd64. You may also want to
ask on the amd64 list since those are the people working on the port;
they would know what they had to change. I can only guess that all the
binaries will be different (64 bit not 32) while the docs will be mostly
the same unless they refer to one or the other, ditto scripts (text
files). But this is on a bit/byte/word basis. The actual packages are
different, with different names (with different README files). If jigdo
treats packages atomicly then the answer is probably "not much". It is
an elegant idea though.
I'm assuming that you are doing this because you want to end up with a
full media set instead of just a netinst.iso or CD1.iso. For just one
CD it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Re the hardware, be forwarned that the 'raid' is likely
software-windows-driver raid not true hardware raid so you would use the
kernel software raid.
I'll be interested in hearing what others say. Let us know what you
find.
Doug.
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