LOcal FTP for installing and apt

[Harry Kuhman]

Well, I finally got Debain sarge installed to hard disk today. Took three tries, lots of apt getting each time though, and I'm far from anywhere near an enjoyable install. Also, since I couldnn't seen to convince the installer to use the partitions I wanted for it and I gave in and let it take all remaining disk space, I'm likley going to be tossing it off and reinstalling, both to try a Kanotix install and just to get the install "right". So this causes me to wonder if I might not be better off downloading the packages I need or want to a local FTP server and then install much faster from that (and put less load on the debain FTP servers, since I expect I'll install more than one more time).

The questions are: Can I even do this? I remember seeing a list of available servers during the install, but don't know if I can install from my own local server or if I'm forced to pick from the list. (It sure seems like I should be able to use my own FTP server, but there's a lot of things in Linux I expect to be easy but, at least for the novice, are not.) Assuming I can do this, is there a good way to determine what packages I need to download to my server (I have no idea what packages Debain gets, but I saw it take about 700 during the install). Or am I planning on doing something completely stupid?

Running the local FTP server should be no problem, but I only have about 4 to 5 gig of space for the FTP server. That certainly seems like it should be enough, but I may have to be somewhat selective in what I have on the server that way.

[CrashedAgain]

Just use the mirrors, that's what they are there for.
If you do a Kanotix or a Knoppix hdinstall, there is no downloading needed (other than to get the original Kanotix/Knooix disk) but once you have the hd install you will probably want to upgrade it or add packages; this will involve some downloading.
When I was doing several pretty much identical installs (experimenting with Kanotix-Knoopix mode, debian mode, two machines...), first I made a list of packages I wanted to remove, removed them, then did apt-get upgrade which needed about 400 Meg of packages. These get stored in /var/cache/apt/archives until you remove them with apt-get clean so I just copied the packages to a backup location then copied them back into /var/cache/apt/archives for the next install so I didn't have to repeat the download each time.

[firebyrd10]

That seems to be a problem with the older installer.

Try this.
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-i386/rc2/images/netboot/

its the mini.iso

[Harry Kuhman]

That seems to be a problem with the older installer.....
Thanks, but what exact do you mean by "That"?

[firebyrd10]

That seems to be a problem with the older installer.....
Thanks, but what exact do you mean by "That"?

The harddrive partitioning problem.

I thought I hit quote....

[Harry Kuhman]

Harddrive partitioning problem.

I thought I hit quote....
Thanks. Quote woulldn't have helped unless you narrowed it down to the item anyway.

I did grab the mini.iso. Not sure when I'll try to use it, as I would like to figure out the answer to the main question, can I get packages available on a local FTP server before I do, to make future installs a lot faster (and what surprises wil I have when I try to do this). But it's good to know that I wasn't the only one to find the partitioning an issue and that it's been addressed.