Quote Originally Posted by surfwax95
Well I'm looking at Debian's website right now, and it seems that I could download via Bittorrent, but the files are very confusing...there are many many seperate files/torrents. How should I go about getting all of them to my computer?

My suggestion:

  • Go here: http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

    Follow the link to the type of hardware you have, most likely i386, the 4th choice in the sable CD list.

    Download the torrent for the first or first and second CD. Underscore says you will rarely use CDs beyond that, and you can always download more later or download packages directly from the web.

    Make sure the BitTorrent ports forward correctly in your router's firewall.

    Start BitTorrent and download the first one or two ISO. These torrents start very slow so give them a few minutes. I just grabbed CD 1 and it started very slow. But in a few minutes I was downloading at my full download capacity. And although I was seeding, very little of my available uploading capacity was being used. So my thinking is ignore horror stories of the downloads being slow and get a full CD or two.

    Make and Install from the CDs.


There are ways to download smaller images and then install everything from the Internet. If you were only going to install once and were certain that everything would go perfectly the first time, it would make sense to do it that way. My result with doing it that way was that I ended up doing several installs before I got something I was happy with. Each was slower than needed because they were all done across the Internet. So for a novice (like me) I suggest using the full install CD rather than doing it across the Internet. You spend a little more time up front, then can install much faster as many times as you want.