9. Getting and Installing Debian GNU/Linux

9.1 Where/how can I get the Debian installation disks?

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.

Please follow the instructions given in the Installation Guide. It is available in the files install.txt (Text) and install.html (HTML).

Some special cases are mentioned below.

9.2 How do I get and install the Debian from CD-ROM?

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.

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.

9.3 I have my own CD-writer, are there CD images available somewhere?

Yes. To make it easier for CD vendors to provide high quality disks we provide Official CD images here.

9.4 How can I get/install the Debian from a set of floppy disks?

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:

• Short MS-DOS filenames: If you are trying to place Debian package files onto MS-DOS formatted disks, you will find that their names are generally too long, and do not conform to the MS-DOS 8.3 filename limitation. To overcome this, Debian developers make all of their packages available by 8.3 filenames in separate "msdos" subdirectories ( 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.
• Large file sizes: Some packages are larger than 1.44 MBytes, and will not fit onto a single floppy disk. To solve this problem, use the dpkg-split tool, available in the 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.

9.5 How can I get and install Debian directly from a remote ftp site?

Install the Debian package dpkg-ftp.

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:

• the fully qualified domain name of the anonymous ftp site you plan to use.
• 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").

9.6 How can I get and install Debian from a tape?

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.

9.7 What is the latest version of Debian?

Currently there are two versions of Debian:

• "2.0", a.k.a. "stable". This is stable software, but it may change when major fixes are incorporated.
• the "unstable" version . This is the version currently under development; it is updated continuously. You can retrieve packages from the "unstable" archive on any Debian FTP site and use them to upgrade your system at any time.

  It is planned that this will become a new Debian release several months after the last release.