[nmglug] nicer debian install CDs

[Mark Galassi]

Amigos, I have frequently been annoyed that I can't tell my buddies to
"do yourself a favor and install Debian".  Why?  Because the installer
is confusing, and the CD ISO page throws you into a 10-CD set, and it
talks about jigdo (what are they on??), and the Debian home page says
nothing about an easy path to install, and the tiny netinst CDs are
hard to find from http://www.debian.org/

In our GLUG we (rightly) love Debian, and to help evangelize on it I
just ran across this page:

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/installers.html

which offers several nice installer approaches.

Does anyone have experience on them?

Another tip: "quemu" is very nice and quite mature given how ambitious
its scope is.  I have experimented with GNU/Linux distro installations
with qemu, and it works!  If you want a pleasant surprise, try the
very simple sequence:

$ su
[...]
# apt-get -u install qemu
# control-D
$ qemu -user-net -cdrom /usr/local/src/KNOPPIX_VERSION.iso

and see KNOPPIX run.

If you want to *install* instead of running live-boot you can do
something like:


## to make a 6gig disk:
dd of=/u/rosalia/qemu/try-diskimage bs=1024 seek=6291456 count=0

## then to boot off a CDROM with the UserLinux install disc, and the above hda:
qemu -user-net -boot d -hda ~/qemu/try-diskimage -cdrom /usr/local/src/UserLinux-netboot.iso

(then to run that installed system use "-boot c" instead of "-boot d")