On Tue 13 Jun 2017 at 09:20:43 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
I am running Stretch that was fully updated/upgraded less than
a week ago. I have the flash drive used to do the original
install of Stretch. I have not _intentionally_ purged any files
from cache.
The cache will contain those files the installer got for you when
you selected and installed software, plus anything else you obtained
after the first reboot. For the sake of example let us suppose you
installed the mate desktop and the standard utilities.
The cache will not contain files from the base system, but that
doesn't matter because they are in the installer image, as is GRUB.
The standard system utilities are also in the image; no bandwidth
penalty there.
I wish to install Stretch on two additional machines. I am near
my internet data cap and wish to make *ABSOLUTE MINIMAL* usage
of available bandwidth.
I've not completely thought this through but you definitely would not
want to use the select and install software option, apart from leaving
standard utiliites ticked. You also would not want a network mirror
but, unless you are going to use sneakernet, you will want networking
in order to be able to connect to your primary machine.
The purpose of this is to test the _installation process_ itself.
That eliminates anything resembling cloning. A secondary benefit
will be learning more about how Debian does things.
After rebooting, create $HOME/debian and copy all the debs in
the cache on the primary machine to it. I think dpkg-scanpackages
(in the dpkg-dev package) might also have to be run. Your
sources.list will have the single line "deb file......" ; see the
sources.list manual for details.
After that it's the usual apt-get update etc, etc.