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.