GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installing GNU/Linux Basic Survival Wajig Applications AI, Machine Learning, Data Science Android - GNU/Linux Devices Audio Backup Booting CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Cloud Computing Command Line Databases DIA Directories Disks Emacs EcoSysL Email Evolution Files File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks FreedomBox Fonts Ghemical Glade GNOME Graphics, Images, Photos Hardware Initialisations on Booting Installation Examples IOT Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan MATE Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Power Management PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Screens Security Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce Spreadsheet SSH SUDO Swap Teradata Data Warehouse Themes TV Unity USB Version Control Video Virtualization Voice over IP World Wide Web WebCam WordPress Web Sites Word Processing and Printing X XML Troubleshooting Index

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE UPDATED SURVIVAL GUIDE

Download Debian Packages

Now download from a local server the actual packages that will make up the contents of the CD-ROM:

$ ./make-pseudo-image binary-i386-1.list ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/debian

This takes quite a while! The end product is a file called pseudo-image. All the other pseudo-image* files can be removed (they're used to keep track of where things were up to in case the download is interrupted).

This download is called the pseudo image because it's an approximation of the real image! It's pretty close, but not yet guaranteed perfect. It is a simple process to now turn it into an official image:

$ mv pseudo-image binary-i386-1.iso
$ rsync --verbose --progress --stats --block-size=8192 \
  mirror.aarnet.edu.au::debian-cd/2.1_r4/i386/binary-i386-1.iso .

This uses rsync to synchronise your CD-ROM image with the official one. When this is complete you can burn this CD-ROM image directly to CD-ROM. Most CD-ROM burning software supports burning iso images directly.

Some other useful rsync commands allow you to hunt around the directory structure of an rsync server. Some useful commands are:

List contents of the rsync server's root directory

$ rsync mirror.aarnet.edu.au::

List the contents of another directory

$ rsync --dry-run mirror.aarnet.edu.au::debian-cd/2.2_rev0/*