The squeeze CD #1 [a], which is probably still one of the most commonly mass-produced Debian CDs, no longer contains the Gnome desktop environment, or any self-contained working desktop environment. I believe the multiarch CD [b] also lacks a DE. I wanted to bring this to the attention of the desktop and gnome team, who presumably might care, since I have seen mentions of it, but nobody taking action to fix this. Apparently the desktop task is just too large for the CD now. The minimum packages that *must* be on the CD for the desktop task to be offered at all are as follows: gnome-desktop-environment xorg xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-input-all desktop-base menu iceweasel Some of this could be trimmed, but not much. All told, it comes to 551 MB of packages. Leaving out the last 2 packages from the list, it's 550 MB of packages. Leaving out Recommends, 405 MB. IIRC, debian-cd currently treats Recommends like Depends, and always includes them. So, some options: 1. Ship squeeze with a CD that requires a fast network to be useful. Sorta like the netinst CD, but bigger. The default choice. 2. Switch the first CD to be the KDE CD [c], or the XFCE+LXDE CD [d]. 3. Find a way to make gnome fit. One way would be to make it include only a subset of the gnome-desktop-environment task. (Full GNOME would still be downloaded from a mirror if a mirror was available.) Or try to trim back the recommends either in debian-cd or otherwise. 4. Find some other creative solution. For example, we could pack CD #1 full of useful text-mode tools, recovery tools, net admin tools etc, and round it out with the top packages from popcon and make it a sysadmin dream CD. (I think #1 is a pretty dreadful choice. Even on a moderatly fast network, downloading all that stuff was going to use another hour of my time this evening. If this happens we should IMHO deprecate use the CD #1 in all documentation and recommend another CD or DVD.) [a] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/i386/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-i386-CD-1.iso [b] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/multi-arch/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso [c] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/i386/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-i386-kde-CD-1.iso [d] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_beta1/i386/iso-cd/debian-squeeze-di-beta1-i386-xfce+lxde-CD-1.iso -- see shy jo
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