Which CDs to burn (testing, sarge)
 

Hi all,

With the help of a friend, I got ahold of a second box here at work. House rules unfortunately are currently that Windows is the only system allowed to run on our network, so I'm installing from the Sarge 1 CD. After the base installation, it was easy to confirm the obvious -- there are a lot of important packages not on the first CD.

Looking around the Debian website and doing some searches failed to turn up any kind of list that describes which packages are on which of the testing CDs. There are 14 of these CDs, so I was hoping I'd be able to select just a few of them to burn, since I don't need everything. I still don't quite get why testing is so much more voluminous than stable, perhaps it has something to do with various versions of the same packages being present?

Thanks if you can point me to any docs.

Mike

Are you saying that your Debian box will NOT be granted Net access? That sucks if so. You would only need the minimal netinstall iso if you had access, and wouldn't need 14 cd's with packages on them because you would fetch from apt repositories...

Just to keep things clear: Sarge is currently the "testing" flavor; however, it should replace Woody as the Stable version very shortly (we've heard that one before). At this point a new name will be chosen for the version of Testing to replace Sarge.

Sid is and always remains the "Unstable" branch.

http://packages.debian.org/testing/

That breaks down what is in Testing at the moment. I don't know if each cd you burned has a packages file listing each one so I can't help out there. Just wanted to say welcome to Debian!

I re-installed from the new debian-installer last night, having given up on Gentoo finally. It feels great to be back.

Yes that's correct, and yes it sucks. My colleague's department was "let go" after the professor retired, and he's now under our roof. Since he has always worked with Debian, he'll continue to do so, and he's been given some IP addresses. Once he gets things up and running and can prove the network is secure and stable -- it should become more so than the Windows server -- then probably I can hook up to his network. I'm not knowledgeable enough now to secure a system on my own, so I can't connect until some point in the future. Then I can start working entirely on Linux. At the moment I am using a switchbox for monitor, keyboard and mouse, and will probably transfer files with a USB stick.

Thanks for this list, I had seen a similar list, so I will bookmark it. I guess I can just burn the first few CDs and see if I need more. I am hoping for a list though, that's a lot of CDs to burn.

one cd:

Sarge Net-install RC1

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

download the i386 one, take the newbie default installation, check with F3.

take the default partition, skip the line to choose packages, you'll do that with apt-get. Finish the installation, login, become root and:

#apt-get install x-window-system locales vim icewm icewm-themes

or any other desktop environment you like. proceed to do the post-install configuration.

Did all that, but forgot x-window-system. I'm having a really bad day in general.

I did an apt-cache search icewm and it didn't return anything on either of the first two CDs. Still haven't burned numbers 3 and 4. Maybe icewm is not on the first couple of cds.

Thanks.

x-window-system not available.

This is why a list would be useful.

For the sake of anyone doing a search later, here is what I found out:

In order to install the base system plus x-window-system and icewm, you need to have the discs 1-4. NOTE: This is valid for Sarge as the testing version, as downloaded Sept. 29, 2004.

Astonishingly to me, when I tried to apt-get install the package iceme, I got a "is not a candidate" error, despite having the first four discs, and when I tried openbox, I got a "package not found" error.

However, x-window-system, icewm, and icewm-themes are installed, along with vim, locales, localepurge, deporphan and debfoster.

For the record, those four CDs (again, this week's Sarge as the testing version) are enough to install Gnome; in fact, the first two are enough. They will likely also install KDE, though I didn't.

I actually reinstalled because I wasn't sure how to get rid of gnome properly. I read the APT-how-to and was using "apt-get --purge remove", but the problem was that only removes packages that depend on that package. I even got rid of x-window-system and xlibs, but I could still get into a Gnome environment (minus panels). So as an experiment I uninstalled/purged debconf, heheh, although at that point I had already decided to reinstall -- there were some other issues too that I wanted to double-check.