Rickh, i have read your artical and i have also read the comments of other memebers. well i am the person to which this artical is directed i.e. newbie with a little experience on Fedora.

I would say that your artical has made a good sense and has given me a great knowledge base and comprehension of Debia. i have dsl connection and am downloading the Debian40r5-ia64-DVD and it is almost downloaded. i shall install it on my HP Pavilion laptop i.e.duo2 core 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM and 64 bit system.

I shall keep you people posted that how much Rickh's artical helped me and how much i was prepaired for the problems on the way. i am thankful to you Rickh for guiding me and taking your time out for a linux learner like me!!

I believe you will need the AMD64 disc for that processor.
The ia64 disc is for the older Itanium processors.
Also if you have a good internet connection,the net-install disc is the way to go.
As shown in Rickh's tutorial.

Regards.
The trooper.

@Trooper and Rickh, are you sure that i am downloading the wrong version of Debian and it wont be of any help on this Duo 2 Core T7300 @ 2.0GHz intel Laptop? I have spent a good time downloading it and it has just reached at 92%?

http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/

Netinstall is the way to go if the machine is connected to the Internet..
Saves a LOT of time downloading, not to mention bandwidth, since many people have their connections limited on the amount they can download.

Is there a list anywhere that tells you what software is on each of the Debian CDs? I am sure I do not want, or will ever have need for, all 25000 pieces of software, and it is wasteful in both time and resources to install the lot. I am not a complete newbie and have had plenty of experience at partitioning disks and installing various distros etc., but it is about time I took the next step! I have the Xfce Debian disk 1 installed and ready to go....

Unless you are installing on a PC without broadband there is really no reason to ever download all those CD's (that are usually full of out of date packages before you download them ) the 150MB Netinstall CD is the one to use. it will download ONLY the current versions of the packages you are installing.


To answer your other question YES, there is a way to see what packages are on each CD / DVD. You can use the jigdo search for this task.

CD1 or DVD1 will always have everything needed for a basic system with a Graphical desktop. anything else you can add from the network repositories after install.

Thanks Farslayer,
My 'learn Linux' PC does not have an internet connection which is why I am working from the CDs. After trawling through the package lists on the Jigdo page to find open office and a couple of other bits of software I now have CDs 2 and 6. The next step will be to pick out the bits I want and install them. We will see how I get on!