Someone asked about making Debian CD's from Windows. Here's how I've been doing it;
Create an archive on your Windows machine, for example c:\debian_cd Copy the 2880K rescue image (from disks-i386/2.2.4-2000-01-03/disks-2.88 in the master archive) to c:\debian_cd Copy drivers.tgz, disks-1.44/rescue.bin, and base2_2.tgz (from disks-i386/2.2.4-2000-01-03 in the master archive) to c:\debian_cd\debian\dists\potato\main\disks-i386\current Create another directory for the .deb's, for example c:\debian_cd\archive Copy all of the .deb's for the packages you want to c:\debian_cd\archive You may already have them available from /var/cache/apt/archives if you haven't cleaned it out. Create a template using your Windows CD software. Set the CD's root to mirror c:\debian_cd. Add bootcatx.bin from the following utility to the CD root first. http://annex.com/craig/archive/mkbtcd102.zip Create the ISO image using your Windows CD software. Be sure to set the file system to ISO9660 with Rockridge extensions (long file names). Mode 1 seems to work best. Use the mkbootcd utility to make the image bootable. Here is a usage example for mkbootcd.exe; mkbootcd cdimage.iso bootcatx.bin rescue.bin Typing mkbootcd without any command line parameters will display a help screen Create the CD using your Windows CD software. Boot and load the system with the CD you just made. Prior to using the apt-get method, mount the CD and copy the contents of /archive to /var/cache/apt/archives You can make fresh CD's periodically to minimize the number of downloads and upgrades after install. One handy feature of dpkg is dpkg --set-selections < selections where "selections" is an ascii file listing user desired selections. The format can be seen by using dpkg --get-selections. An install script could look like this; echo "apt apt" >/var/lib/dpkg/cmethopt echo "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian potato main contrib non-free" >/etc/apt/sources.list dpkg --clear-avail dselect update dpkg --set-selections < ./selections dselect install -- Craig H. Block, Debian user Debian GNU/Linux potato Linux 2.2.13 SMP i686
