Hello Martin,I am also new to Debian having only just installed it. But maybe I can help a little bit and others can correct any inaccuracies.
I have broadband that is fast enough to have allowed me to download all 15 CDROM images from a mirror site and burn them to CDs. If you do this you need to load the installer and use it to check the integrity of the CDs i.e. that there are no errors on them. If there are and you try to load the OS you will go nuts trying to figure out what is wrong. I have even been sold CDs with Fedora Core 5 on them by an on line retailer that had errors on them. I detected this and I ended up burning replacements myself.
In general people think this 15CD business is a bit silly. They think that installing the operating over the internet s a better idea.
If you have a DVD player and you downloaded the DVDs you would only end up with 2 images. This is much more convenient that 15 CDs and it would speed up loading the OS using them.
When I downloaded the CDs I used Bittorrent, not Jigdo. The idea of bittorrent is that if a lot of people are downloading the same files then it uploadd them at the same time from the same people and uses their extra individual bandwidth to speed up everyone's downloading simultaneously (or something like that).
The problem was that at the site I used to download the CD images hardly anyone was downloading them so it didn't speed up the download much. So I ended up using wget which is like an http download but smarter not faster.
I could download at about 100 Kb/sec. People have downloaded Ubuntu at 3 Mb/sec using bittorrent because so many people are downloading it simultaneously.
I did download jigdo on to Fedora that I use and tried to install it but it failed to due some dependency problems. I would say that jigdo is probably not going to help you much because it uses wget and so since I imagine you don't have any old Debian CDs around you will have to download the images in entirety with it and it won't go any faster than it did for me.
It took me 3 days to download the CD images burn them and check their integrity.
If you could download just one CD that you can use together with an internet install I think this would be the way to go if you have a broadband link. The other thing to do is to buy the CDs from a vendor.
If you have not used Linux before then you will need to put the CD in the driver and boot upn the machine with it in and then follow the installation instructions as they come. If your machine won't boot from the CDROM then you can get a boot image, a root image, and a CDROM driver image and netboot image that you can then write to four floppy disks and use them to fire up the PC and then get the CDROM going to continue the install.
What is different about this OS from other Linux distributions I have used is that if you install e.g. the desktop environment at least in my case it didn't put a window manager in. It just stuck XWindows in there.
So at least in my case you couldn't get the usual GUI type window environment working until after you have installed the window manger e.g. Gnome.
Hope this helps Mikef
From: Martin Smith <smithclamp@tiscali.co.uk> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: downloading the files using jigdo Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:27:55 +0100 Hi,i am currently using Windows XP home and wanted to use Debian to see what it is like, now i have got Jigdo, and i am not sure what files i have to download using and how to actully use Jigdo.I have read the FAQs and the help documnet on the website but i am still confused on what i download and how to use Jigdo.Could you please help me. Thanks Martin --To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
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