Saturday, August 11, 2012

Debian Sid, via 19 MB mini.iso image and network installation

I tested the recently advertised Debian 7.0 Beta 1 installer, and Beta 1 was a complete bust.  It would not get past the network detection phase of installation, no matter what I tried, so I entered a bug report against it and it turned out that many encountered the same thing.

Within an hour of my bug report, the maintainer sent a message that the bug was closed.  I wrote back, thanked them for the quick response and asked where I could obtain a new image to test it.  They suggested I grab a mini.iso network image from the daily build tree.  I did so, it was around 19 MB in size, took seconds to download, little time to burn, but on my capped 262 kbps network, it took about two hours to install.

No problem; it worked perfectly, and I am writing this blog note using the Iceweasel (Debian-rebranded Firefox) Extended Support Release (ESR 10.0.6) Web browser.  It's fast; I set mine to use the Xfce desktop and it was a very good choice.

I selected a minimal set of process daemons to run, so this is light and fast too.