Hi David!
I know that Colin Watson gave you expert advice and it seems like you
are now moving forward. But I wanted to shift gears and ask a
different question.
David T-G wrote:
> I have a trash-able SuSE system I want to use to do a chroot install
> of Debian before trying it on my LFS-based server. I have extracted
> the debootstrap package contents, have /mnt/suse81 ready to catch the
> install, and have downloaded files to a handy /mnt/empty.
>
> For my first try, I pulled down 'stable' to the tune of about 1.5G and
> tried
Oh wow. 1.5GB! Do I understand that you downloaded the entire depot?
Since you downloaded the files to the machine you are going to install
upon I know that you have networking. Which means you can do a
network install instead and only download what you need. You can do
this in a chroot and I think avoid that painful download of things
that you won't be using.
Usually I do a debootstrap using the live network and it only needs
about 107MB to install a basic system. Then whatever else is whatever
else and a basic x86 server runs in the neighborhood of 500MB in a
practical configuration.
The debian.org docs on this (this section written by the other Collin,
Collin Walters, IIRC) are quite good.
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tips.en.html#s-chroot
Additionally Karsten Self wrote a nice howto of related information.
http://twiki.iwethey.org/Main/DebianChrootInstall
Some time ago Guillem Jover wrote:
I've made now publicly available the script[1] I've been working on
to substitute in runtime any distribution to Debian. It does not
convert in the sense of mapping all previous installed packages to
the Debian counterparts, but installs a base system or tarball and
cleans traces from previous distribution, from there you are in a
purified environment. =P
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/01/msg00313.html
http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/debtakeover/
I will note that I have never used debtakeover myself. One of these
days I need to give it a try. :-)
Another very similar application is pbuilder. It uses the
bootstrapping tools to build a minimal environment for building
packages. That allows the dependencies to be completely known and
controlled. I routinely rebuild those and they only take a few
minutes. The resulting small image is around 110MB.
> Going back again, I downloaded about 700M in sarge and tried
700MB! Oh, gosh, that just seems so painful!
Bob
P.S. Welcome to Debian!
Attachment:
pgpNkiBJk2MQA.pgp
Description: PGP signature