Currently there are two versions of Debian GNU/Linux:
Please see How many Debian distributions are there in the dists directory?, Section 5.2 for more information.
You can get the installation disks by downloading the appropriate files from
the Debian FTP site: ftp://ftp.debian.org/pub/debian/
and its mirrors
.
Linux supports the ISO 9660 (CD-ROM) file system with Rock Ridge extensions
(formerly known as "High Sierra"). Several vendors
provide Debian
GNU/Linux in this format.
Warning: When installing from CD-ROM, it is usually not a good idea to choose dselect's cdrom access method. This method is usually very slow. The mountable and apt methods, for example, are much better for installing from CD-ROM (see dpkg-mountable, Section 8.2.5 and APT, Section 8.2.1).
Yes. To make it easier for CD vendors to provide high quality disks, we
provide the Official CD
images
.
First of all, a warning: whole Debian GNU/Linux is way too large to be installed from media as small as a standard 1.44MB floppy disk - you may not find installing from floppies a very pleasant experience.
Copy the Debian packages onto formatted floppy disks. Either a DOS, the native Linux "ext2", or the "minix" format will do; one just has to use a mount command appropriate to the floppy being used.
Using floppy disks has these complications:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/
and
its mirrors
.
You must have support in the kernel for floppy disks in order to read and write to floppy disk; most kernels come with floppy drive support included in them.
To mount a floppy disk under the mount point /floppy (a directory which should have been created during installation), use:
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /floppy/
if the floppy disk is in drive A: and has an MS-DOS filesystem,
mount -t msdos /dev/fd1 /floppy/
if the floppy disk is in drive B: and has an MS-DOS filesystem,
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /floppy/
if the floppy disk is in drive A: and has an ext2 (i.e., a normal Linux) filesystem.
Yes. There are several methods for doing this:
apt
package, and edit the
/etc/apt/sources.list file to suit your needs. You should change
it to include information about a Debian mirror closest to you. Details on
this can be found in apt-get(8)
and sources.list(8)
manual pages, as well as in the APT User's Guide, in
/usr/share/doc/apt/guide.html/index.html.
Then run
apt-get update
followed by
apt-get upgrade
and your system will be upgraded to the latest Debian release.
dpkg-ftp
package (see dpkg-ftp, Section
8.2.2).
Then invoke the program dselect
, which will call
dpkg-ftp
for you, guide you through the selection of packages,
then install the packages, without every downloading the packages themselves to
your machine. This method is designed to save the user both disk space and
time.
Dselect will ask you for the fully qualified domain name of the anonymous ftp site you plan to use (if you don't know of any, try ftp.debian.org or http.us.debian.org).
It'll also ask you for the directory which contains the files you want to install, or the subdirectories which contain files you want to install. This directory must contain a file called "Packages" (or its compressed equivalent, "Packages.gz"), usually dists/stable/main/binary-ARCH, where ARCH stands for your machine architecture.
Please note that when you get and install the packages, you'll still have them
kept in your /var directory hierarchy, so remember to delete extra files, or to
move them someplace else (hint: use apt-move
), or your partition
may overflow.
At present, installing packages directly from tape is not supported. One can however, use tar, cpio, or afio to copy Debian archive files onto a tape, then copy them onto your local disk for installation. In the same vein, floppy disks containing "tar" files would have to be copied onto a local disk before they could be managed with the Debian package tools.