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
zlinw@mcmedia.com.au writes:
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 :-)).
You must install a lot more crap than me :-) Showing off time! Here's what I downloaded: # du -sh /var/tmp/live/var/cache/apt/archives/ 70M /var/tmp/live/var/cache/apt/archives/ And here's the finished product: # du -sch /var/tmp/live/boot/{vmlinuz-*,initrd.img-*,filesystem.squashfs} 2.4M /var/tmp/live/boot/vmlinuz-3.8-1-amd64 8.1M /var/tmp/live/boot/initrd.img-3.8-1-amd64 40M /var/tmp/live/boot/filesystem.squashfs 50M total That's wheezy with the kernel cherry-picked from unstable, configured to work as an appliance, like your ADSL modem. And over 60% is the kernel; with a localyesconfig kernel I get a total size of 23MiB. A minimal install from debian-installer will be the cost of d-i and udebs (up to about 120MiB) plus about another 100MiB or so for Essential and Priority: standard packages. These days I think you'll need to boot with priority=low ("expert") or possibly pass desktop=none, or it will default to installing the GNOME environment (which is rather big). I'm nearly 100% sure you can pass desktop=lxde or xfce to get a smaller default install that still has a GUI, though last time I measured that, it was still over 1GiB unpacked... Let's run some numbers (starting from the 70MB base install above)... (live)# apt-get install xorg task-xfce-desktop --no-install-recommends <<< no | grep -A1 Need.to.get Need to get 120 MB of archives. After this operation, 360 MB of additional disk space will be used. (live)# apt-get install xorg task-xfce-desktop --install-recommends <<< no | grep -A1 Need.to.get Need to get 609 MB of archives. After this operation, 1922 MB of additional disk space will be used. Making a little table, w/recommends wo/recommends dl/install dl/install task-lxde-desktop 540/1666 MB 104/305 MB task-xfce-desktop 609/1922 MB 120/360 MB task-gnome-desktop 852/2584 MB 373/1120 MB task-kde-desktop 866/2478 MB 352/989 MB A GUI base install in the worst case should be around 1GiB to download and nearly 3GiB of desktop, by my reckoning. I grant you that's still pretty horrible, especially if you're intending to do >>1.
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trentbuck＠gmail.com -
zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au