A problem that I have with debian etch is that there does not seem to be a way for selecting specific packages in "graphical group" etc during installation.
Am I doing something wrong ? Is there a way to go in deeper and select/deselect specific packages during install ?

The minimal install is just that, very minimal. You didn't do anything wrong by selecting that installer, but if you were looking to have a one stop shopping kind of experience, you should select an installer that includes a graphical installer.

You have many choices on how to go from here. Since you should have created a user for yourself during the install, log in as the regular user, then su, and apt-get or aptitude install your desktop of choice. -> That will download the kde packages. You also could install gnome, or whatever you like. Then exit out of root, and as your user, issue the command startx and you'll get a desktop.

Peace,
JimBass

No, I chose the "desktop", "laptop" and "standard" (ow was it base ?) packages. What annoyed me was that there was not a finer control, I could not go into desktop and select deselect specific packages.

If you want a minimal system, you're not supposed to be installing gargantuan metapackages such as "kde". You're not even supposed to check "Desktop" on the task selection screen. Go to the Howto's section on the Debian Forums for enough information on minimal installs to make you sick of the idea.

Er, which forum are you referring to ? I did not see a howto thread here (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/ )

But even with this "bloat" debian is spiffy compared to suse. My suse install takes 6GB. My debian etch takes around 3.4GB (granted I do not have KDE)

Maybe you'd better stay here. Folks on the Debian forums are sometime a little hard on people who don't use google.

If you just want specific packages don't select any of those installer options. Just use apt-get after the installer is done, for example:

apt get-install x-window-system
apt get-install gnome-core
apt get-install gedit

And so on.. for which ever packages you need.

if you install Debian using the expert mode doesn't Debian give you the option of using dselect to select a specific package set ?

I usually do the minimal install and then manually install what I need as well.. It's much less work and quite a bit faster, but I think I recall seeing this option in the expert mode..

does anyone else recall ?

Easier yet would be to do your first install. manually ad what you want, then save the package set.
next install do a base install, them import the package set from the other machine and do an apt-get dselect upgrade.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but someone on another forum was saying that in Sarge there was a "Manual" option in the Tasksel menu. I don't think it's there any longer in the Etch or Lenny installers (not even in Expert mode).

Yes, this works wonderfully! Here are the commands you need. Create package list:
And in your new base installation:
Having several times gone through the process of manually entering apt-get commands to assemble my preferred set up, it was a joy to come across this technique.