Re: Re: Is the a 'contrarian' Debian install available?

[Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 10:48 PM, Paul Condon <pecondon1@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think I have also read somewhere that netinst is a minimal system that is
> capable of hardly anything, except downloading and installing more packages
> from a mirror on the web. For this to
> be true in any meaningful sense, I had always assumed that it is capable of
> booting from hard disk.
> And Tom is finding that his install is not capable of doing that. The
> sequence of events for a netinst type install is that at some point *before*
> the CD is popped out, the grub boot program is written to the MBR space on
> the hard disk. Then after rebooting you are offered the tasksel dialog to
> specify what you want installed into the final system.
>
> OTOH, if you use businesscard, you do your tasksel before popping out the
> CD, because, I suppose,
> the businesscard install is not capable of booting from what it has written
> onto the HD, just as a 'live' disk does not automatically write itself onto
> the HD. But Tom never said anything about the properties of businesscard, or
> about using businesscard in his experiments.
>
> If I have recalled incorrectly, and the netinstall CD does ask for tasksel
> selection before popping out the CD, then there is very little observable
>  difference between the two. (Also, not something
> that Tom expressed an interest in. ) And, perhaps both install systems that
> are incapable of booting from HD. That is very minimal, indeed.

I'm not the one experimenting, it's the OP.

You can install either a base system or base+standard system from a
netinst.iso without an internet connection and they'll both boot up
from the HD onto which you're installing.

You do get the tasksel menu when you use netinst.iso at the same stage
as with other installer sizes before grub's installed not after a
reboot. If you have internet access, you have the same tasks available
as other installer sizes. AFAIR this is all with the expert install;
with the regular install, you have to have an internet connection (the
last time that I tried this was when Squeeze was "testing", so I might
be misremembering or that requirement might have been dropped).

I brought up the businesscard.iso in an earlier email in another
thread (AFAIR, with the same OP) to show the difference between it and
the netinst.iso.