GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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CD or DVD ROM Distribution

The available CD and DVD ROMs for Debian include the main distribution, which is a self contained install, and the network installer^5.3(netinst) CD-ROM. Other CPU specific CD-ROMs (e.g., the Sparc 3.0 srage CD-ROM) are also available from Debian. The disk images can be obtained from, for example, http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/debian-cd/ and similar archives (this Australian mirror is only available to Australian hosts). For CD-ROM only installations you may need to obtain multiple CD-ROMs, although even with DVDs this is starting to spill over two DVDs. For the netinst approach the CD-ROM images are generally around 100MB.

Grab the disk image from a web site and burn to CD or DVD (preferably using an RW format!):

  # cdrecord -data cdimage.raw

A good approach is to use the netinst approach--the base packages are provided on one CD-ROM and from there the rest of the system is installed, as required, over the network.