Debian experts needed, ho ho ho.

[skyfolly]

I was trying to download the Debian Cds last night, but I was scared away by the number of disks in the ftp server, actually, how many do I need to finish an all packages included installation?

Thanks a lot.

regards

[craig_mcd]

It depends on what you want to install, you probably only need the first or fifth cd. If something is missing just apt-get. You should apt-get anyway to update your software and security updates.

You should use the fifth cd as it contains the 2.4.18 kernel, by default debian will use the 2.2.x kernel so you would loose netfilter, usb etc.
You need to select bf24 at boot to choose the 2.4.18 kernel when installing.

Obviously you could just download the latest kernel from kernel.org and recompile.

[bpark]

Yea, this is one of the things I had a hard time understanding. I obtained the first cd from ftp and from what I read one www.debian.org, it stated that the first five cds contain different flavors. I believe the first was vanilla and the fifth was bf2.4. Since I wanted bf2.4 for it's modules, I thought I should download the fifth cd but a user told me to just use the first cd and type bf2.4 at the 'boot:' prompt when the cd loads. He was absolutely right since the kernel I got was from bf2.4 using the first disc. So I'm thinking that Debian meant to say that the five different cds have a default kernel if you don't specify which kernel you want at the boot prompt. What do you think?

[craig_mcd]

Yeah, you are right. I just tried it now.
I have been using the xfs filesystem which has a different installer so I just went of what I could remember and what was on debian.org.

One more thing, get the non-us version.

[bpark]

craig,

Do you have any idea as to when the next release is due? As much as I love Debian, they do take their sweet a** time with releasing new versions. Then again, this distro has been the most stable version I've used.

One more thing, get the non-us version.

Well, if he/she is installing from the internet, all they have to is add a line to /etc/apt/sources.list. Generally, you'd want to add the security packages as well.

[craig_mcd]

No idea, the last release was in December last year. Check apt-get.org, they have sources for loads of software that isnt yet in the stable branch. I had to do that to get the latest versions of KDE and mozilla.