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If I want to install a debian with a debian netinstaller image, but have no internet connection during the installation progress, what has to be done afterwards?

To be more concise:

  • What steps (configurations etc.) are performed by the installer?
  • Which packages are installed by the installer?
  • other issues?

Is there a common way to perform needed steps to get the same installation result as if installing with a available network connection?

GAD3R
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furthermore
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1 Answers1

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Netinstall uses relatively few packages in the image because it counts on being able to get the packages it needs from a network connection during the install process. Thus it mostly just needs:

  • Firmware
  • Partition tools
  • Network Drivers and tools
  • Graphics drivers and tools
  • All of the libraries needed to run the above tools

Nearly all other packages can be installed once it inspects the hardware it is on.

You can open the image of one of the installers and see. I found these two lists of Packages, they list 653 packages and total about 260MB so there are still some things I'm not accounting for (maybe the kernal image):

./dists/bullseye/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
./dists/bullseye/main/debian-installer/binary-amd64/Packages.gz

Each entry in the list looks similar to this:

Package: libasound2-udeb
Source: alsa-lib
Version: 1.1.9-1
Installed-Size: 1215
Maintainer: Debian ALSA Maintainers <[email protected]>
Architecture: amd64
Depends: libc6-udeb (>= 2.29)
Description: shared library for ALSA applications (udeb)
Description-md5: 844d1bd91111279036698cd2bff8eb54
Section: debian-installer
Priority: optional
Filename: pool/main/a/alsa-lib/libasound2-udeb_1.1.9-1_amd64.udeb
Size: 341328
MD5sum: e97e28f17905d28c9ab96d4d077d2dd7
SHA256: 472c6037a14178a93c4086a59af632a33c07a428da639d00d8ee9aa3b3766758

Rather than dump them all here, if you are interested in more specifics you can pull an image from the debian-installer page and poke around.

There is a very common way to install without a network: use larger installation media. IIRC all of the free packages (and maybe contrib and non-free?) fit on a blueray image. So if your target has a blueray player you can install everything you need without a network. Using a CD or set of CDs you can get something between netinstall and all the packages.

In my experience it is nearly always easier and less painful to get a network connection and use netinstall. This may mean using your laptop as a gateway or even your phone.

user1794469
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