On Wed, Mar 18 2009, Dr. Sharukh K. R. Pavri. wrote:
I finally decided to ditch Kubuntu due to multile problems. I tried Mandriva and was completely floored by the install progress. It offered me the option of using ndiswrapper for my wifi card right during the install and the card came up automatically after the install. Clean interface. But I don't want to start a new learning curve right now. But it's definitely going into a vmware vm soon.
So back to good old debian. First I got the netinst cd and then tried the debain-kde cd. So far so good. It asked for the isl3886 firmware from a new medium but that was that. The wifi card did not work after the install. Not debian's fault because I haven't been able to get the card working with anythng but ndiswrapper.
Did you provide the firmware on a usb key? I am surprised that the card would not work, if there is support in the kernel, and you had the required firmware.
Even though this was a 'full' cd, the install insisted on downloading a hell of a lot of files (more than 50 or so). Then after the full install was over and I had rebooted and ran apt-update and apt-get upgrade, it wanted to delete almost 40 files using apt-get auto-remove.
A netinst cd is a "NETwork INSTall CD". I am amazed it only needed 50 or so files, usually the bulk of the OS is acquired over the network,
If I try to install without using a net mirror, the sources.list is bare except for the cdrom line.
Yes, you have to edit the list manually, if you do not provide a network mirror for a network install cd.
Now I want to install debian on another machine at a different location. Seeing as how I've already dowloaded all these files on one machine, how can I use this to avoid downloading them again for the second install. What are the options available ? What I was thinking is install without a net mirror, and then copy over the sources.list and the contents of /var/cache/apt/archives to the new machine and then run apt-get update and upgrade.
This will work. Indeed, if you can create the partitions and the file system ahead of time, you can opt to not partition the drive and not wipe the file systems, in that case create empty partitions, except that you populate the /var/cache/apt/archives directory. That way, you can go ahead with the install in one step; it will pick up after the base system is isntalled from the CD.
manoj