Hi, I've been wondering about the best way to go about an install of Debian (unstable or testing). What I have done in the past is to start by installing from the latest available CDs. At the point of the install where you get to choose what packages you want choose _nothing_ and end up with a minimal install of stable. Next I edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a local mirror of testing (or unstable as the case may be) and do apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade When I last tried this the upgrade failed because the scripts could not remove the old version of exim in order to make way for the new. I did dpkg -P exim and when that failed due to dependencies worked back removing things untill exim could be removed. Then did apt-get install (insert here all the packages removed in the previous step) followed by apt-get dist-upgrade again. At this point I have a minimal installation of the testing distribution. Next I switch to using dselect so that I can pick up some recommended and suggested packages along with with the packages I know I want. In the past I have run dselect once without selecting anything in the hope of picking up recommended and suggested packages to go with those already installed. Unfortunately it appears that the default selection contains packages other than those that are there to satisfy dependencies, recommends or suggests from the packages already installed. Is there a way to set the selection to retain the install status for all installed packages and those that would be selected to satisfy depends, recommends, and suggests while removing the others? regards, Ken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
