Re: pkgsel

[Martin Schulze <joey@carelia.infodrom.north.de>]

Please only refer to debian-boot@lists.debian.org in your replies.

Philip Jensen wrote:
> I installed Debian v2.0, and after the first re-boot I am asked for a
> password for root.  Ok, no problem so far.  But, I discovered an
> application which runs automatically after you have logged in for the first
> time called PKGSEL.  This allows you to chose a basic initial installation.
> However, this program/script cleverly deletes itself.  I did a reinstall,
> so I could back the file/s up before PKGSEL completed running, and deleted
> itself.
> 
> I thought this was an excellent way of making Debian easier to install.  I
> have attempted to work through dselect, however my knowledge of dselect is
> minimal, and I found dselect fairly laborious to use.  When you select a
> package, it advises about dependancies, and then you need to choose those,
> etc, etc.  I guess I just don't know how to drive it very well, even though
> I have read the dselect.beginner.txt file.
> 
> Anyway, does anyone know anything about pkgsel (which is a perl script).  I
> would like to investigate further to make Debian easy to install for my
> friends, who I want to try Debian/GNU Linux.

What do you want to know?  The used technique is quite easy.  Extract
a selection with "dpkg --get-selections > foo.select" and install a new
one with "cat foo.select | dpkg --set-selections".  You'll find the
entire list in the boot-floppies package.  I'm sure that a current
version of it can be found in our incoming directory right now.

Regards,

	Joey

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