On Thu 15 Jun 2017 at 06:26:55 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote: > On 06/14/2017 12:56 PM, David Wright wrote: > >On Wed 14 Jun 2017 at 08:50:18 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote: > >>On 06/13/2017 01:10 PM, Brad Rogers wrote: > >>>On Tue, 13 Jun 2017 12:51:10 -0500 > >>>Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net> wrote: > >>> > >>>Hello Richard, > >>> > >>>>netinst iso. I had never experimented with just how much could > >>>>be done with netinst without any internet connectivity. > >>> > >>>Probably not a lot. See; https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ Internet > >>>connectivity is expected to exist. > > > >Well, it sort of depends where you draw the line between internet > >and Internet connectivity. Fifteen years ago I played about with > >a private partial mirror where the source of the debs was via > >commuternet, ie Zip/Jaz disks transported from my Janet-connected > >office. The "internet" was a cat5 cable. > > > >>I'm wishing I had discovered the netinst iso years ago. > >>*NOTE BENE* Up until about a year ago I had only dial-up. The only > >>practical installation path that met my needs was purchasing > >>complete DVD sets. I spent many hours trying to coerce Debian into > >>doing a minimalist install. > > > >What parameter are you actually minimising? > > For the purpose of this thread, the downloaded byte count. Period. > > However understanding netinst will influence how I approach doing a > "minimal" install. [I use quotation marks to emphasize that > "minimal" can mean very different things to different people.]
Then I'm guessing that DVD vs netinst is not really the factor, but finding out how to change the package selection made by the debian-installer itself; not something I've looked at beyond the obvious user interface offered by expert install. > >>If I had succeeded, I suspect the result > >>would have been close to netinst WITHOUT internet connectivity. But > >>I've learned a lot. > > > >Does it make any difference to the resulting package list whether you > >install using netinst or a stack of DVDs? > > I doubt it. If there were significant differences it would indicate > a problem. > > >I had assumed that you could > >deselect all the options in the "Software selection" screen whichever > >way you installed, and end up with the same thing, a system with > >~248 packages installed. > > Are all 248 packages "necessary"? [Note usage of quotation marks ;] Probably not. Take a look at the priorities of those packages. Here there are 14 extras, 96 optional and 53 important. Of course, you have to study what those terms mean. os-prober and wireless-tools are extra. Amongst the optionals are initramfs-tools, grub, various firmware, more wireless stuff. Don't forget the kernel image too. > A mechanics question, "How to count the number of installed packages?" > I'd like to be able to reproducibly count installed packages. Various ways, but I only know how to use dpkg itself (as others here suggest) introspectively, so I don't use that; the system you're studying might be sitting on another partition. To see the packages on the system, the number of entries in /var/lib/dpkg/*.list is useful; /target/var/lib/dpkg/*.list gives you that *during* installation, of course, as /target is where the new system is constructed. grep '^Status: install ok installed' /var/lib/dpkg/status | wc -l or, for Greg, grep '^Status: .* ok installed' /var/lib/dpkg/status | wc -l excludes what's not yet installed if that's important. grep -B3 -A2 '^Priority: extra' /var/lib/dpkg/status | less gives you the names and approximate sizes of the extra packages. I'm sure you can come up with better patterns. And you'll probably use aptitude's why/why not feature a lot to see how a package's gross size is influenced by the dependencies it pulls in. Cheers, David.
