On 2010-01-03 at 10:30:34, Paul E Condon wrote: > I haven't been following this thread, but your statement > caught my eye.
This thread started on debian-user with the original title of "Install". A new user asked for help in finding the right images to download to boot the Debian installer from a floppy disk. I replied that Etch was the last Debian release which supported booting the installation system from floppy disks. I said that if his computer BIOS didn't support booting from a CD, one solution would be to install Etch by booting from floppies and then upgrade to Lenny. I then recommended that if his system did support booting from CDs, he should use the CD image dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso That sparked two other lines of discussion. The first one was whether this image was a "netboot" or a "netinst" image, and what was the difference between the two. The second topic was which installer should be used to install Squeeze. At this point, my best guess is that this is a "netboot" image, which is, strictly speaking, an oxymoron when it is used in this way (i.e. burned to a real CD-R and booted directly), since by definition you are not booting from the network if you are booting from a CD. Nevertheless, it is my favorite installation image since it is the smallest image (about 8M for the i386 architecture), is available from the most locations (every Debian mirror), downloads quickly, burns quickly, and is the least succeptible to bugs (since as much code as possible is downloaded from the internet, where bug fixes can accumulate after the image is burned). This boot image contains just enough code to boot the machine and configure the network. Everything else, including most of the installer code itself, is downloaded from the internet. As for installing Squeeze, I pointed out that the Lenny installer, though it will let you install Squeeze with it, should not be used to install Squeeze, and I pointed out that the "production" Squeeze installer is actually the Lenny installer. I recommended the "daily build" images available from the development pages for Debian installer to install Squeeze. Someone else pointed out that the Sid installer is apparently newer than the production Lenny installer and that he had used the Sid version of the above mini.iso image (for the power-pc architecture) to install Squeeze, and encountered no difficulty. Someone said that the daily/weekly build images don't work, and I replied that they have been having build problems the last few weeks and referred him to the debian-cd list for a discussion of the build problems. I can't speak for others, but I'm not really trying to figure out what went wrong at this point. I'm just waiting for the daily/weekly build people to get their act together and start building daily/weekly images that work and are accessable again. And that's where we sit at this point. At this moment, it looks like the Sid version of the mini.iso image dists/sid/main/installer-i386/20091215/images/netboot/mini.iso is the best bet to try a Squeeze install from scratch, since the daily/weekly builds appear to be broken at the moment. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
