Oliver Fairhall wrote: > I would like to include non free firmware/software/docs in my > initial Debian installation. I have read some information online, > though am still not sure of a few things.
Must it be in the initial installation? Note that there are some systems that presently must include some nonfree firmware in the initial system install in order to work. See Bug#696571#77 for example. Hopefully these will be fixed before Wheezy's release. But hopefully these are rare corner cases. > I will make a USB flash install drive, to be used on a number of > machines, including some which will never see the internet. Since you will make a USB image this gives you some flexibility to build a custom install image that includes the additions you want. I have not personally spent too much time on USB images but this seems reasonable. > I am assuming all this material is free, as in beer; is it possible > to download an image of these collections, or download everything > from the relevant repositories, and package it in such a way that it > is available for Debian's installer to use? Yes. Anything in non-free is distributable but only free as in free beer. There has been a lot of discussion on the mailing lately about preseed files. You probably want to read through the archives. What you want to do is to create a custom usb install image with all of the packages you want on the image and additionally create a preseed.cfg file on the image that includes among other things that you will need something like this with whatever packages you require. You probably want some of firmware-linux-nonfree, firmware-ipw2x00, firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-realtek or others. d-i pkgsel/include string package1 package2 Here are some resources for you: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apb.html Bob
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