You can get the installation disks by downloading the appropriate files from the Debian FTP site: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ and its mirrors.
Please follow the instructions given in the Installation Guide.
It is available in the files
install.txt
(ASCII) and
install.html
(HTML).
Some special cases are mentioned below.
Linux supports the ISO 9660 (CD-ROM) file system with Rock Ridge extensions (formerly known as "High Sierra"). Several vendors provide Debian in this format; these vendors have directly supported the Debian project:
iConnect Corp.
14355 SW Allen Blvd., Suite 140
Beaverton, OR 97005
Flexible Software
1000 McCrackin Road
Tallahassee, FL 32308
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:
stable/msdos-i386/
, non-free/msdos-i386/
,
contrib/msdos-i386/
, and development/msdos-i386/
).
The files in these
subdirectories are merely symbolic links to the Debian archive files;
they only differ from the files in the binary-i386/
, etc.
directories by having shorter file names.tools
directory at
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.
Install the Debian tool
dpkg-ftp. This package
is currently installed in the directory development/binary-all/net
at
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ and its
mirrors.
For details on installing a package, see notes on
dpkg.
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.
Note that no special kernel configuration is needed to access and
install Debian packages by this method.
To use this service of dselect
, you will need to know:
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.
Currently there are three versions of Debian:
It is planned that this will become a new Debian release about three months after the last release.