Debian - What is Netinstall Made Of?

v 0.2

Let us say that you are a curious person and you decided to do a Debian Netinstall (Squeeze or Wheezy, it matters not), but when you reached the "tasksel" screen you unchecked everything, so that nothing further would be installed.  What sort of system would you end up with?

Well, it's actually not a bad console system.  Obviously there is no X, however you can start it up, and log in to a console.  Apt is set up with appropriate sources.list and you have Internet capability.

If you want to list the packages, then:
      " dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt "

as root will place a list of installed packages into the file " selections.txt " in the root account.

Of course, if you want use this principle to duplicate what you have on one Debian install onto another, then you update the package database of installed packages with:
        " dpkg --set-selections < selections.txt "
Once again as root, before doing an Aptitude update and upgrade.

Now, looking through the packages in  " selections.txt " the included ones that caught my eye were:

• The complete Dpkg / Apt / Aptitude toolset
• bash
• gcc
• gnupg
• groff
• gzip
• mawk
• nano
• perl
• sed
• tar
• vim
• wget

In its own right, this represents quite a capable system, three programming languages, a typesetting system, excellent text editor, encryption, backup and an awk text reporting language.  Not bad and certainly fun.


Expanding the System

As part of the netinstall setup, the apt sources.list was configured for your preferred country, and even though this is only for the "main" sections, that is perfectly adequate if we wish to build our own custom Linux system.  We don't have a graphical client like synaptic, but we have the Debian tools we can use.  Aptitude provides a consistent front end to the Apt and Dpkg tools.

"  aptitude search xorg | more "

will return a list of those packages that are to do with xorg.  You can repeat the process with any search criteria you like to have a look at available packages you might like to install.

To show details of a particular package you are interested in:

" aptitude show xserver-xorg "

You are now well on your way to installing Xorg to your machine.  To find a graphical login manager, try:

"  aptitude search x-display-manager "

and you'll be shown a number of packages on the last line that you might like to look at.  Likewise, you can look at window managers, desktops or whatever you like.


Conclusion

I haven't set out to provide a definitive set of instructions here, but to show what you can do when given a minimal system and the sorts of things you might like to poke around with.  With some care you can have just the packages you want, and a slim, fast setup.


Later ............