potato info

[Joey Hess]

Alan DuBoff wrote:
> 1) is the potato baked fairly decently at this time?

I wouldn't call potato half-baked, but it really needs some more time in the
oven before it's as tasty as hamm. (Now see what you made me say. :-)

> 2) what do I need to grab to do an install? I would like to build the CDs, and
> assume that I can build a set of CDs similar to what Cheapbytes sells (or in
> potato's case, doesn't sell at this point in time).

I don't think CD's of potato can be made yet for a couple of reasons. I've
heard that boot floppies for potato are presenting a problem because they've
run out of space because a few things are bigger compiled on the new system.
Also the program that builds the CD's always needs a few hand-tweaks for
each new release to get everything just right and nobody has even started
doing that yet.

> My plan is to use a 2.5gig partition that has Red Hat 2.0.36 on it, blow that
> away and download the potato directory (I have another partition on the disk
> with Red Hat 2.2.7 +mods), then create the CDs and install to that partition.
> Is 2.5gig enough for all the images in potato?
> 
> I do have Debian 2.0 r3 on a set of Nov-98 InfoMagic CDs, but my guess is I'm
> better off skipping that and going straight to potato. Ultimately, I want to
> get it on a new machine I'm building, and almost have all the parts aquired,
> the remaining parts are supposed to be in on Monday (when I'll pick up the
> case, CPUs, memory, mobo). I want potato as this machine will be a dual PIII
> Xeon.

I would encourage you to install from the 2.0 cd and upgrade via the net.
You won't lose anything by installing this way. 

If you want you can even just install the base system off the cd (boot from
it, answer the questions, reboot, get up on the net), and then immediatly
reconfigre apt to download stuff from unstable over the net and upgrade to
unstable from that point and then install other packages on top of the base
system.

A quote from http://cdimage.debian.org/ that seems appropriate:

   If you are installing Debian for the first time, you should either do an
   ftp install or save yourself a lot of aggravation and buy a CD from a
   vendor near you. A lot of first time installers seem to be laboring under
   the misguided belief that they must have a CD image from which to
   install. This is not true, and is actually a waste of their time and
   money since they would be able to achieve an ftp based install in less
   than a quarter of the time (the CD has a lot of packages that you will
   never get round to installing on it)

-- 
see shy jo