Re: Image click-though system
Alex <ocelet@dingoblue.net.au> writes:
> hi,
> I was looking at starting out with debian after experiencing the
> wonders of apt-get on a friend box and of course went do download the
> CD images. You seem to have a mission option: I have a free Internet
> connection but its bloody slow and would rather download an entire
> image over a few days then install it quickly than have to leave it
> installing for days and having to connect/reconnect.
Well, perhaps, but you will probably find that the network install is
getting towards an order of magnitude faster than downloading the CDs,
so you could do several network installs before justifying the CD
download.
We're not trying to make your life more difficult than necessary here.
Debian installs really rather nicely over even quite slow links, so
any guesses you may be making about the relative usefulness of
boot-floppies against boot CDs are not likely to be accurate.
If you still are desperate to get hold of a CD, the most efficient way
to do it is described here:
http://cdimage.debian.org/ch1211.html
but I strongly suggest that you give the "download some floppies, and
away you go" technique that you were initially unimpressed with.
I must admit that the instructions you were given (about downloading
the entire directory) are not quite right IMO, because you only
normally need 6 floppy images. In the case of a normal PC, they would
be:
/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/rescue.bin
/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/root.bin
/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/drivers-1.bin
/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/drivers-2.bin
/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/drivers-3.bin
/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/drivers-4.bin
You then write the images to floppies, and boot off of the rescue
disk.
[Anne, This is all described in:
/dists/stable/main/disks-XXXX/current/README.txt
so perhaps ch11.html should refer to that rather than saying download
the directory]
> At least make the actually images easier to find! One of the reasons
> i did make the original plunge form Linux from Windows is that
> mandrake allowed me to download a simple CD image rather than a mas
> of folders I'd then have to manually make an image out of, not the
> mention the convince of being able to simply have a distro sitting
> in a cd case instead of having to download again from scratch every
> time. I know its probably a bandwidth issue but...
Bandwidth is an issue, but we're largely addressed that with the
pseudo-image-kit (see link above)
The main reason is that for Debian, the CD is significantly less
important that other distributions, for a whole raft of reasons, so
we're trying to save people the irritation of spending a lot of time
downloading something and then finding that they could have done the
same thing in much less time if they actually used Debian the way we
generally use it.
Downloading a single CD over an ISDN line will take a little over 25
hours on a good day.
Installing a Debian system from scratch over the same line will take
something like 1 to 4 hours, depending on which packages you install.
The fact that you can decide to add packages in dribs and drabs over a
longer period means that the install time overhead subjectively drops
even further, because any particular package will normally take only a
few minutes, and you can get on with something else while it arrives.
Feel free to waste your time if you feel the need though :-)
Cheers, Phil.
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