How many debian cds to install

If your Internet connection is charged by the minute, this is your only choice. You might also consider buying media if you only have a slow internet connection, as downloading all the images might take a very long time. The "jigdo" scheme allows you to pick the fastest out of Debian mirrors worldwide for your download. It features easy mirror selection and "upgrading" of older images to the latest release.

The following links point to image files which are up to MB in size, making them suitable for writing to normal CD-R W media:. The following links point to image files which are up to 4. Be sure to have a look at the documentation before you install. If you read only one document before installing, read our Installation Howto , a quick walkthrough of the installation process. Other useful documentation includes:. The official CDs may freely be used, copied and sold by anyone anywhere in the world.

Packages of the non-free category have restrictions that conflict with this, so these packages are not placed on the official CDs. Sometimes, someone is kind enough to create unofficial non-free CDs. If you cannot find any links on this website, you can try asking on the debian-cd mailing list.

What's the difference between official and unofficial images? Official images are built by a member of the Debian CD team and have undergone some testing to ensure they work. Once they have been released, the images never change - if they turn out to be broken, a new set with a different version number is released.

Unofficial images can be built by anyone - CD team members, other Debian developers or even advanced Debian users. Typically, they are more up-to-date, but have received less testing. Some have new features e. You do not need to install anything on the hard drive. All programs run directly from the medium. The Debian Live Project produces live image files for a variety of system types and media. If your Debian disc fails to boot, first ensure that you have correctly written it to the medium - please see the explanation above.

Where are the images for M68K, Hurd or other architectures? Are images for the unstable distribution available? Due to the fact that the packages in unstable change so quickly, it is more appropriate for people to download and install unstable using a normal Debian HTTP mirror.

If you are aware of the risks of running unstable , but still want to install it, you have a few choices:. To find out which image contains a certain file, use the cdimage search tool. Can I have a list of all the packages contained in an image? Look on cdimage. For Debian Live images, you can find in the same directory as the image files some similarly named files suffixed with. Download these and then search them for the desired package name. The software on the official CDs is outdated - why don't you release a new version?

We only make official releases of the stable distribution when we think they truly deserve that name. Unfortunately, this means that stable releases only happen about every 2 years If you require more recent versions of some of the software in Debian, you can install stable and then upgrade via the net those parts you want to the versions from testing - it is possible to mix software from the different releases.

Alternatively, try out the images of testing that are generated automatically every week. More information about testing security support is available from the security FAQ.

If you only need newer versions of specific packages, you can also try the backports service, which takes packages from testing and modifies them to work on stable. This option may be safer than installing the same package directly from testing.

How do I know if I am downloading the newest images? The note at the bottom of the Debian on CD page always shows the version number of the latest release. How can I verify the downloaded ISO images and written optical media? Detailed information on how to authenticate the signed checksum files containing the checksums of the ISO image files is available on the authenticity verification page. After cryptographically verifying the checksum files, we can check that:. The problem with the verification of written optical media is that some media types will possibly return more bytes than those found in the ISO image.

Therefore, we need to read exactly the same number of sectors of data from the media as are found in the ISO image itself; reading any more bytes from the media will alter the checksum result. Most likely, the tool you use for downloading the image does not have large file support, i. The usual symptom for this problem is that when you download the file, the file size reported by your tool and the amount of data that it downloads is too small by exactly 4 GB. For example, if the DVD image is 4.

Some old versions of wget also suffer from this problem - either upgrade to a version of wget which does not have this restriction or use the curl command line download tool: curl -C - [URL]. Note that they're all frontends to the previously mentioned low-level burning applications. On recent versions of Windows, this can be done natively by right-clicking the ISO and selecting "Burn image to disk or similar ". If any of the hardware in your system requires non-free firmware to be loaded with the device driver, you can use one of the tarballs of common firmware packages or download an unofficial image including these non-free firmwares.

Instructions how to use the tarballs and general information about loading firmware during an installation can be found in the Installation Guide. Skip Quicknav Blog Micronews Planet.