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[SOLVED]9.2.1-amd64-netinst.iso - invalid mirrors

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Lew_Rockwell_Fan
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[SOLVED]9.2.1-amd64-netinst.iso - invalid mirrors

#1 Post by Lew_Rockwell_Fan »

I've tried Debian maybe half a dozen times in the last decade or so. I always run into the same problem at the same step - selecting an archive mirror. The first couple of times I just kept trying one after another and after trying 50 or so I'd finally hit one that worked. Later, I discovered you could get away with just skipping that step. This time I looked in the log as suggested by the installer. Cat it and grep 'mirror' and found about half wern't reachable and the rest didn't have Stretch packages. This has happened to me on 3 machines now, but all at the same location.

Apt-get does work, but it never heard of any of the packages I try to install and it updates very quickly with only a few lines of output and no errors, so it reaches the net - I assume it has an abbreviated sources.lst

If you think I'm on the right track maybe you could point me toward what the sources.lst ought to look like. Or make some other suggestion. I don't want to use an installer that puts a whole DE in place. I just want to be able to add specified packages to a minimal install.
Last edited by Lew_Rockwell_Fan on 2017-12-13 15:45, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: debian-9.2.1-amd64-netinst.iso fresh install - can't get

#2 Post by bw123 »

Lew_Rockwell_Fan wrote:maybe you could point me toward what the sources.lst ought to look like.
/usr/share/doc/apt/examples/sources.list
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Re: debian-9.2.1-amd64-netinst.iso fresh install - can't get

#3 Post by None1975 »

Please, check this.
OS: Debian 12.4 Bookworm / DE: Enlightenment
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Re: debian-9.2.1-amd64-netinst.iso fresh install - can't get

#4 Post by tynman »

I don't want to use an installer that puts a whole DE in place. I just want to be able to add specified packages to a minimal install.
One of the last steps in the Debian installer is "Software Selection". On that screen ..

Uncheck Debian Desktop Environment

Leave unchecked: GNOME, XFCE, etc

Check/uncheck WebServer, SSHServer, PrintServer, StandardUtilities as you require. There is documentation on what these last options include, but I don't recall where to find them. (I never use WebServer, but I generally do select the other three options(SSHServer, PrintServer, StandardUtilities).)

If you uncheck everything, you get a very minimal but usable "Debian/Linux" system.

Lew_Rockwell_Fan
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Re: debian-9.2.1-amd64-netinst.iso fresh install - can't get

#5 Post by Lew_Rockwell_Fan »

@ bw123
@ None1975
Thank you, both. These work, so lack of an adequate sources.list was indeed the proximate cause of the problem. Studying the difference between these 2 was enlightening also.

@tynman
Thank you. I didn't at first catch that you meant that this is true for ALL the different flavors of installation isos & that I could use ANY of them, not just the net-install one, to roll my own. That's an important point because it provides the only simple route I've found to to install a fresh system in which EVERYTHING is acquired over https instead of http. It can be done with the net-install, but not nearly so easily, because it doesn't contain the package needed for apt-get to use https, apt-transport-https, whereas the bigger isos, do.

The long list in the installer of non-functioning archive mirrors & the consequent necessity of finagling a sources.list seems to me a bug, albeit one I haven't seen anyone else complaining about. Maybe it is something odd about my ISP, or maybe I'm being stupid about something. Anyway, this works.

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