On Fri, 10 May 2013 11:04:26 Trent W. Buck wrote,
I assume you've already considered and rejected simply installing from mini (12MB) or netinst (around 100MB), and then installing only what you need, on demand, via apt's http method? That would be the obvious way to do it if your installed box has reliable internet access.
I have tried it, the problem I found is that the longer I maintained and updated my own package repository the more problems I had with a net install and subsequent local upgrade. A complete new install from the net downloads something like 3 gig of packages, a figure I consider to be to high (I am being very provincial here :-)). I found a complete standard install from my stable repository, copying the package selections by the method in the Debian docs then doing a dist-upgrade to my latest local copy of testing was completely reliable and easily repeatable over all my three systems. I only upgrade testing when a signifcant change takes place, I would be lucky to upgrade it once a year.
If you have a central host that has internet, and airgapped ones a day's travel away, you could use apt-walkabout to queue requests up over sneakernet between them. I didn't have much luck with it myself -- I found it easier to run a debmirror on the internet end, and generate monthly rsync --only-write-batch binary diffs to post out on DVD.
I have no easy way to access interent much better than I can here. There is a internet cafe in town (Note 1) thats quite fast but I found the downloads were not always reliable, downloading something like DVD image was possible but it was not really repeatable, :-(. Note 1: One has to be carefull and keep an eye on the distances one travels living in the "sticks", you can easily end up with a fuel bill thats really unsustainable these days. Lindsay