David T-G wrote:
I also don't want to take my first pass at this on the server, a fragile node in the household. It would be much better to test on a spare box first. That, then, also leads to why a mirror would be useful (I'd save myself *two* frustrating WAN installs). The test machine is a typical PC and I plan to get it installed and then upgrade it to Sarge (which I plan to run on the server mentioned above).I should be able to knoppix-installer it and then, I believe,apt-get distupgrade to fill in all of the missing pieces (how do I specify the software set?) and maybe or maybe not upgrade to Sarge; it's still unclear to me whether or not Knoppix 3.7 is Woody or Sarge in the first place (though I *think* the latter).
Rather than Knoppix, you might look into Kanotix, which is closer to "pure Debian", I believe.
Rather than starting with something non-Debian and moving to Debian, I'd start with Debian, Sarge, to be exact.
You imply that you're going to "apt-get dist-upgrade" via the net (as I can't imagine any other way you can upgrade without having some source of files, and you mention no other source). I'd get the netinstaller for Sarge (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/, which is something like 50 or 100MB, small enough to fit on a jump drive if your machine will boot from it, or a mini-CD, or a regular CD, etc), and do the rest of the install over the net. You say your DSL connection is lousy, but it can't be worse than a dial-up connection, which I've used many times to do a full install of Debian, with X and other heavyweight apps. Once you have the .debs downloaded (in /var/cache/apt/archives), you can keep them and burn them to CD or move them over the LAN to other machines, and place them in the ...archives directory there and install them from the local repository. I mean, what's the purpose of having DSL if you don't use it?
Since this is a server, you probably won't need X and OpenOffice.org and KDE and gimp and blah blah blah, so a small install over a lousy LAN sounds a whole lot easier than futzing with a non-Debian installer and then converting.
Just my 1/6th of a bit's worth (rounded). -- Kent