Doing the "dselect" portion of an installation
I apologize in advance for asking a tedious newbie-style question, but a couple hours reading FAQ lists, newsgroup archives and the last couple months of the archive of this mailing list still doesn't help me put it all together.
This week I've done test installations of RedHat 4.1, Slackware 3.1, FreeBSD and the "bo" distribution of Debian. I had CD's for RedHat and Slackware but attempted to do the Debian release by downloading the floppy images and then putting the "base", "libs", "net" and "x11" directories on a FAT partition on my hard disk drive.
At first I attributed the confusion surrounding my use of "dselect" to the fact that I didn't have a whole image of the CD on my disk partition. After doing some reading, though, it appears that everyone has this problem when they try their first Debian installation.
Is there a document some where that walks me through an example of installing a few packages at a time after a new installation? Once I get my hands on a Debian CD-ROM I'd like to do the basic installation and then add only a handful of things to my system. For instance, initially I'd put the following on my system: 1) enough of the compilers and libraries to build my own kernel, 2) XFree86 and a couple of window managers to try out, 3) just enough networking to dial my PPP ISP and do ftp, telnet and mail, 4) the Xemacs package, 5) LaTeX and maybe LyX. And being the conservative type that I am, I'd prefer to do these one at a time and in roughly that order. Of course, there a other nice applications I'll need to do my real work on the machine (xlisp-stat, g77, Maple, web browser, etc.) but I first want to get a basic system running and hammer on it enough to be convinced it is reliable and suited to my tasks at hand.
Does each step in the process mean sorting through the package descriptions and figuring out what I need, then running several dependency-solving iterations through "dselect" until the messages stop? Or is there some grouping method that I missed (reading the "deity" discussion leads me to believe no such thing currently exists)? One reason I'm considering Debian rather than RedHat or Slackware is that I like to exercise control over what goes on my system. OTOH, I'm not infinitely patient in trying to get a usable system (that implies networking a X windows) up and running.
Oh, and one final query. Is the "Greenbush" source as good as any for getting Debian CD's? Seems like a good deal w.r.t. being up to date and reasonably priced.
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