On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 02:07:53PM -0800, Van Snyder wrote: > What's the "alpha2 installer?" > > I usually do a netinst. Then I have to install each thing I actually > use when I discover that it's not installed by netinst. > > I need development tools. I need LaTeX. I use some old stuff such as > xv and pdftk.... > > Is there in an installer that lets me choose more than a basic system?
The Debian installer is a suite of programs and stuff. Kinda like a package, except it's special. Each time there's a new Debian release, the Debian installer has to be updated to support whatever new features the new version of Debian is supposed to have. So, you've got a development and debugging cycle of the installer itself. That's what the "alpha 2" refers to here -- the second alpha release of the Debian installer for bookworm. It has nothing to do with the state of bookworm itself. All of the packages that will be part of bookworm go through their own entirely separate development and debugging processes. Release Critical bugs are tracked, and need to be resolved, and so on. An installation image is the combination of the Debian installer and a handful of packages. There are several different installation images of differing sizes. The difference between them is the number of extra packages that are included alongside the installer. The "netinst" images are the smallest ones. They include just enough packages to get the standard Debian system up and running without needing to download anything from the Internet at installation time. The "DVD" images are much larger. They contain enough packages to fill up a DVD (4.7 GB or so). In all cases, you're using the same installer. The installation *process* doesn't change. After the base system has been installed, you're given a menu from which you can select additional software to install -- SSH server, various Desktop Environments, and so on. If you select some of these things from a "netinst" installation image, you may have to download a bunch of packages from the Internet during the installation. If you select that same thing from a "DVD" installation image, there's a higher chance that the packages you're installing are already on your installation medium, and won't have to be downloaded. That's the SOLE difference. After the installation is done, you reboot into the new system. From there, you can continue installing other packages if you want. Experienced users often have a good idea which packages they want, and may just do something like "apt install build-essential xorg fvwm mutt ...". Newcomers will probably take longer to learn what packages are available, what they do, which ones would be helpful to install on their systems, etc. Adding extra packages in this way isn't part of the installer, because it doesn't have to be. You can simply do it after rebooting. If you're installing several systems concurrently and want them all to have the same set of packages, there are tools to automate this. This is beyond the scope of this thread, but if you want to know about this stuff, you can always ask. I'm sure someone on the mailing list will be able to help you with it.
