Re: BE MORE SIMPLE!!!!
On 8 Jun 99, at 20:57, John Hall wrote:
> How in the world do I download Debian? I've been at your site for 30
> MINUTES and have gone to every distribution link on it, but there's no
> singular link that actually downloads ALL 2250 files of Debian, and WHO
> in the world is going to down load TWO THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY
> FILES one at a time!!
*snip*
As one Debian newbie to another, let me offer some advice.
First, let me say that I can understand your frustration. About the
only thing that I don't love about Debian is what seems to be a
shortage of documentation compared to other distributions, and the
first time this bothered me was when I spent much longer than 30
minutes trying to figure out just what it is I needed to download.
HOWEVER, patience does pay off, and getting frustrated rarely
solves problems. Thirty minutes is NOT that long to spend on a
Linux problem. Be patient, read all the documentation you can find,
try stuff, and then read the documentation again.
It turns out that the solution to your problem is fairly simple, and I will
share a few tips:
1. You don't WANT to download 2250 files. Why in the world would
you want to? I can't imagine one human being wanting to use every
single Debian package, and even if someone did, it would be MUCH
faster and easier to download them with APT-get. (more on that
later)
2. To the best of my knowledge, there is no single file that contains
the entire Debian distribution except for the CD image, which is only
useful if you want to burn a CD. I could be wrong about this, but
regardless, there's really no need to download the entire distribution.
3. Off-topic: if you did want to download an entire large FTP
directory, downloading the files individually would NOT be wise,
when there are so many freeware FTP programs that can do such a
job for you. Check Tucows under the FTP section if you ever need
to download a lot of files from an FTP site. However, there's no
need to do that to install Debian... apt-get does a wonderful job.
4. (here's the key) There is a small file in the slink/main/disks-
i386/current directory of any of the Debian FTP sites called
install.txt. This file is your FRIEND... read it, and it will mostly be
smooth sailing from there (mostly). It will tell you want files you do
need (all you need to download right now are a few files from the
disks-i386/current directory), and what to do with them. Go through
it step-by-step, downloading what you need. You won't need to
download more than 15 MB or so of files now, and that will be
enough to either create bootdisks or use loadlin, start the Debian
setup program, partition your hard drive, install the base filesystem,
get ppp running, and use the dselect program to start downloading
the packages you want. The installation process is pretty self-
explanatory; it will guide you through setting up a PPP connection,
setting up apt-get, selecting packages you want, and then
downloading, installing, and configuring them. Once you see the
huge size of the packages list, and start browsing through it, you'll
probably be saying, wow, I'm glad I didn't waste my time
downloading all this stuff! Most of it is stuff you'll never need;
downloading it all is kinda pointless. That's what dselect is for; to
allow you to easily select what you want to download.
5. Don't get frustrated! For me, figuring out which files I had to
download to get a base system up & running was much harder than
the installation itself! :) (well, except for rescuing my partition table
from the brink of oblivion, that was kinda nerve-wracking)
REMEMBER: install.txt is your friend! Read it, read it again, save it,
print it out, pray to it for good luck, etc.
Here's the addy of the file on one of the FTP sites:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/slink/main/disks-
i386/current/install.txt
And the directory containing the files that you'll need to download in
order to boot into Linux for the first time:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/slink/main/disks-i386/current/
6. Good luck!
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