Andrei PopescuThanks for your reply. Hope you don't have to snip too much. My yet outstanding question is the POOL directory. I think the POOL directory contains 'sarge' which would be the latest official release. But I am not sure.
But everyone seems to get distracted about me wanting a local LAN mirror of source and binanry. Granted that a dial up connection and especially a dial up connection that is shared between several machines is going to take forever (I estimate over 200 days -- maybe longer if it keeps dropping connections on big ORIG files and then starting over). However, in the next little while I am scheduled to connect to a high speed wireless network which will connect me to a high speed IP. That connection will be about 100 times as fast as the dial up so instead of taking over 200 days it will only take 1 day. I want this all set up in my LAN ready for the high speed connection. When my daughter lived in Calgary (Alberta, Canada) I used her high speed connection and down loaded some 14 or 15 CD ISO images which I transfered as iso files onto DVDs. This took me all day and all night. That was the Woody distribution. I tried a few months later and tried to get "sarge" but in the middle of downloading some ISO images changed and I had to throw away a couple of days and nights of downloading. Also, somehow I blew away her Internet Explorer as it seemed unable to remain stable under the heavy downloading. Never again! I use just my own stuff or do without. She was not a happy camper.
I have been looking for a Canadian source of these 14 CDs -- one that uses the Debian authorized images. I found one (here in Canada) that is based on the DEVELopment directory but I have no iidea if that is supposed to be a reasonably stable distribution. Apparently, they take periodic snapshops of the DEVELopment directory. I don't want periodic snapshots. I want something more stable than what DEVELopment. seems to be. Sarge would be okay. But that's currently what is in the POOL directory. Also, the prices in Canada are about twice that of the USA and the shipping is high if ordered from the USA.
At the present time I do not have a machine on which to run DEBIAN. So, I use live CDs or DVDs which claim to also install the entire distribution but I know from experience that 4 or 5 DVDs are required in order to get the whole show -- all 14 or 15. So one LIVE DVD is not 14 CDs.
I had reserved about 200 Gig of space on the C_drv of my busiest machine (XP Pro machine with Pentium 3) for DEBIAN running in conjunction with Xen the virtual machine. But I did not partition or format this empty space and I cannot get any partition facility to recognize that the empty disk space even exists. Instead, these facilities think that this big disk is just 22 Gig and there is no other space. If you or anyone else knows of a facility that can reclaim this empty space then please let me know. Otherwise, DEBIAN will have to wait for the new machine or go dual boot on one still at the computer hospital recovering from a faulty disk and slow service. I am considering an Intel dual core BUT I DON'T KNOW IF DEBIAN WILL RUN ON SUCH A MACHINE??????
Andrei Popescu wrote:
On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:28:25 -0700 Archive <thilts33@telus.net> wrote: [huge snip] The entire Debian archive is ~205 GB. You do *not* want to download that over a slow connection. Options: 1. Unless you have special needs it is enough to download the first two CDs. That's about 1.5 GB. If you need just a few other packages it is much better to install them directly with aptitude (and option 'with recommends' turned off). You can use the jigdo search facility to find out on what image is a certain file or what packages are contained on a certain image: http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/#search2. Order the full CD set (14 CDs?).HTH, Andrei