Creating a base-only cd image?

[Robert Guthrie <rguthrie@pobox.com>]

Just a suggestion from someone who doesn't know the first thing about 
building a debian cd image from scratch...

I was wondering if anyone had ever considered creating a cd image 
that contained only enough of the system to apt-get everything else 
(from nfs, ftp, or http) after the initial boot.  It seems that the 
cd image would be extremely small in comparison, so less bandwidth 
would be wasted building pseudo-images of it.  On the user's side of 
things, no more boot floppies needed when they can't copy the base 
system to thier hard-drive, but don't want to spend 5 days creating 
the cd image from behind a 56k connection.

I actually did the latter to get started on debian.  I could have 
just configured the base system, and then slowly built my debian 
system from task packages or just individual ones.  

What do you think?  Wouldn't it be pretty easy to just exclude the 
vast majority of the cd image?  Putting this on one of those 
credit-card cd's would be pretty cool..

"Hey Bob, you said Debian was pretty cool.  Want to help me install 
it sometime?"

"Sure, why not now?" pulls out wallet, "Here, put this in your cd 
drive and reboot."

-- 
Did you know that if you play a Windows 2000 cd backwards, you 
will hear the voice of Satan?

That's nothing!  If you play it forward, it'll install Windows 2000.