Hi David! I know that Colin Watson gave you expert advice and it seems like you are now moving forward. But I wanted to shift gears and ask a different question.
David T-G wrote: > I have a trash-able SuSE system I want to use to do a chroot install > of Debian before trying it on my LFS-based server. I have extracted > the debootstrap package contents, have /mnt/suse81 ready to catch the > install, and have downloaded files to a handy /mnt/empty. > > For my first try, I pulled down 'stable' to the tune of about 1.5G and > tried Oh wow. 1.5GB! Do I understand that you downloaded the entire depot? Since you downloaded the files to the machine you are going to install upon I know that you have networking. Which means you can do a network install instead and only download what you need. You can do this in a chroot and I think avoid that painful download of things that you won't be using. Usually I do a debootstrap using the live network and it only needs about 107MB to install a basic system. Then whatever else is whatever else and a basic x86 server runs in the neighborhood of 500MB in a practical configuration. The debian.org docs on this (this section written by the other Collin, Collin Walters, IIRC) are quite good. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tips.en.html#s-chroot Additionally Karsten Self wrote a nice howto of related information. http://twiki.iwethey.org/Main/DebianChrootInstall Some time ago Guillem Jover wrote: I've made now publicly available the script[1] I've been working on to substitute in runtime any distribution to Debian. It does not convert in the sense of mapping all previous installed packages to the Debian counterparts, but installs a base system or tarball and cleans traces from previous distribution, from there you are in a purified environment. =P http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/01/msg00313.html http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/debtakeover/ I will note that I have never used debtakeover myself. One of these days I need to give it a try. :-) Another very similar application is pbuilder. It uses the bootstrapping tools to build a minimal environment for building packages. That allows the dependencies to be completely known and controlled. I routinely rebuild those and they only take a few minutes. The resulting small image is around 110MB. > Going back again, I downloaded about 700M in sarge and tried 700MB! Oh, gosh, that just seems so painful! Bob P.S. Welcome to Debian!
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