Kevin Mark wrote: > If you have internet access and a cd/dvd burner then you can do this: > download a net install ISO and install 'testing' aka 'etch'.
This is, by the way, something I really dislike about the net install disk (I complained once to the installer team but got no response): If you downloaded a testing netinstall CD today, its sources.list would point to testing. Everything would work just fine during the immediate install. But if, some months down the road, you'd use the very same install disk again to install etch on a different machine (or to reinstall it on the same one), it would first install an etch base system from the packages on the disk itself. Then it would proceed to fetch stuff from the "testing" branch of some Debian mirror which by then, of course, won't be etch any more but whatever comes after etch (because by then, etch will hopefully be stable). This has bitten me once when I tried a sarge/stable install with a netinstall disk which came from sarge/testing days. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why the installation ground to a screeching, error-message spouting halt each time it started installing stuff from the net until I realized that the base installation had left "testing" in the apt sources (so essentially I was trying to do an etch install with a sarge installation disk). The easy, and in my opinion essential, fix would be to "lock" the netinstall CD to its named (woody, etch, ...) branch instead of the logical (stable, testing) one. I think a given install CD should result in identical systems being installed no matter *when* those installations are done. If someone on this list is chummy with someone over at debian-installer maybe they could forward this mail to them. --D.
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