Hi,

I'm new to Debian and have been reading about the different releases. I'm a bit confused by the Debian website though. I'd like to download the latest testing version. Is Lenny available yet or we still in Etch? Also, I'd like to do the netinstall. Can someone point me to the download link for netinstall of latest testing?

Many thanks,

ab

Usually, one downloads a stable installation media (netinstall for instance), install a basic system and then upgrade to testing. It's just a matter of editing file /etc/apt/sources.list (change from etch to lenny) and an aptitude update && aptitude upgrade.

Thanks for the help!

-ab

It's perfectly possible to install from a testing cd as well, by the way, you just need to search the site a little harder. Look for something pointing to weekly or daily builds. Of course, testing is a work in progress and you may occasionally find that the installer that comes with testing is a bit buggy, in which case it's safer to install stable and do an a dist-upgrade.

Googling for 'Debian testing netinstall' the first returned hit is the download page for the media...

Just to interject that only the Etch cd's and dvd's installers can configure DHCP properly automatically. Since I have no clue what to type in to configure it manually, I settled for the traditional approach of using the Etch revision 1 DVD 1 to install (the DVD is the only one that has the k7 Kernel on it so if I use that the upgrade to Lenny's Kernel is more automatic). Then I upgraded to Lenny and all is perfect. I just chose the standard task and installed my tasks later using Aptitude once I was already upgraded to Lenny.

In etc/apt/sources.list just comment out (#) the DVD, change the targets to testing, and add contrib non-free to the ends of the lines, and add deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main, then after aptitude update do aptitude install debian-multimedia-keyring. Then do aptitude dist-upgrade and reboot when finished.

Access the sources list by:

su -
editor /etc/apt/sources.list


You'll get Nano, which is easy to use. Later, when you have a desktop you can use your favorite gui editor.

Oh, and do login as a normal user and su for things you need. Especially since iptables isn't turned on until you either configure it or install Firestarter to configure it. Those desktop installs take a long time and I feel safer with only Aptitude and myself having access to root and not the rest of the world.

You can aptitude purge the 2.6.18 linux-image once you've rebooted into the new Lenny Kernel. Just aptitude search linux-image to see the exact package name of the older Kernel. I like to keep just one Kernel, but that's up to you.

Where did you get that information from? It works fine for me and I'm not the only one. If testing failed to set up dhcp, that is definitely not a structural issue; it's just that this installer is constantly being updated and occasionally comes out a bit crippled. Over the past few weeks I have seen testing installers that failed to detect optical drives or that didn't have kernel modules and I even saw one that couldn't find the partitions it had created only a minute before. That's why you should always read the "known issues" first before downloading. But as I said, those are just bugs (remember that it is "testing" after all) and they are usually solved within a matter of days.

This additional repos and distros info is great. I actually used an "etch" cd from 4/15/07 and when the netinstall was finished, I looked at my sources.list repositories and they were set to Lenny (was lenny available then?). I guess at this point any etch cd will pull the latest "testing" distro in its current state off of the servers. I'd be interested to know more about this.

Thanks,

ab

Well, people installing from the Lenny netinstall, cd's or dvd's have all reported DHCP could not be setup by the installer. This was with the October 8 issue, but since it was a week later and was ready to install Debian again I wanted to try the Lenny media out.

I got the same results everyone else did the previous week using the newer media from the 15th.

I hadn't tried the Sid media, but I just stuck in my Etch Revision 1 DVD and did the Standard System task and went from there.

Of course this is not by design, if that's what you think I was stating. It's supposed to work, but just cannot. And no, we shouldn't expect all that many bugs in Lenny. They generally do not allow packages to be released from Sid to Lenny that are too buggy. They really want testing to be a running Release Candidate quality distribution. That's the objective anyway. We have been warned that the debian-installer, excepting the one on the Etch media, are in an alpha state and it is actually recommended to install from Etch and then upgrade for a more guaranteed successful installation. But since they started the weekly builds again I thought I'd experiment with it and see how far they've come. I'm pretty sure that if I knew what to type in when the manual DHCP configuration was offered after the automatic one failed, I could have proceeded. Forum posters have reported success with using alternative ways of connecting once DHCP auto configuration failed. I just didn't know what else to do so I stuck in Etch and it went fine.

For the other fella, no, Etch i386 downloads install Etch and leave the sources.list with Etch sources. You might (must have?) used Lenny media to get Lenny sources written. I know that the Etch DVD released in August as Revision 1 still puts Etch sources in there. That's what I just experienced in my fresh installation. When I installed Debian several months back, I had used Etch DVD 1 from the original April release and that also put Etch sources in, unlike what just apparently happened to you. Somehow you got the wrong media.