As with most other Linux distributions, bootable ISO CD images of the installation files are available for download. At one time there was a frightening labyrinth of questions that had to be answered correctly before finally being shown the list of mirrors, in an attempt to lighten the load on them. Fortunately, this is no more, and the CD page ( http://www.debian.org/CD/ ) now tells you where to find the CD images, rather than telling you to buy a CD or perform some arcane ritual involving the package mirrors and rsync. However, a full install CD may not be necessary. Unless you are unable to get your network working during the install, it may be better to download only enough to boot your system and install the rest over the network.

There are floppy images available for potato and woody which contain enough to boot the system, install the kernel and drivers, and install the rest of the base system through some other means. The base system is contained in a tarball located in the same directory as the disk images, and may be automatically downloaded over http or ftp by the installer, downloaded manually and made available on a local partition or over nfs, installed from a Debian CD, or installed from another stack of floppies.

All floppy images are available in /debian/dists/(potato|woody)/main/disks-> arch> in a package mirror, where> arch> is the architecture of the machine on which you wish to install Debian.

For those who loathe making floppies but don't want or need a full CD, there is hope. Small CD images containing only the contents of the rescue, root, and driver floppy images are available from http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ and work well for a network installation of Debian.

apt-get is the command line interface to apt. With a few simple commands, it can be used to update the list of available packages, install and remove individual packages and their dependencies, and upgrade all the packages in the system to the latest available version. However, apt-get may not be best for installing packages, since it ignores the Recommends and Suggests fields, which may create difficulty in the expected functionality of a package. Suggestions that apt-get have features added to report recommended and suggested packages are generally met with claims that apt-get isn't meant to be used that way, use some other frontend. Regardless, apt-get is still useful for many tasks, and it is helpful to at least be familiar with some of the commands.

update

running 'apt-get update' will download the latest package lists from the locations you put in sources.list, updating the local list of available packages. It is generally a good idea to run this before doing anything else.

install> package name...>

Installs the packages and any dependencies

remove> package name...>

Removes the packages and any packages that depend on them. Configuration files, if present, will be left behind, so the packages will be left in the 'deinstall' state until purged.

upgrade

Upgrades all packages in the system to the latest version

dist-upgrade

Same as upgrade, but attempts determine changed dependency names and may be used for upgrading across versions. For example, if you are running potato and want to run sid instead, you can simply change all instances of potato in /etc/sources.list to sid and run 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade' which will upgrade your system with a minimal amount of trouble.

The full functionality of apt-cache isn't terribly useful unless you really enjoy playing around with apt's package cache, but it can be useful for finding a particular package name. 'apt-cache search> regex>' will give a list of all packages with a name that matches the regular expression, along with a single-line description. 'apt-cache depends> pkg name...>' will print out all Dependencies, Recommendations, and Suggestions for the packages.

apt-move is very useful if you run Debian on more than one computer. It can be used to generate a package archive, usable by other machines, from the package files downloaded by APT.

tasksel is what is run when you choose the "Simple" package selection method during the initial configuration. There are meta packages available, named task-*, which contain no data and depend on groups of other packages. tasksel simply chooses and installs these task-* packages. However, tasksel cannot be used to uninstall anything, and can only be used to install whatever the Debian maintainers felt would make an appropriate group of packages, so it's not very useful outside of the initial configuration.

dselect, the "Advanced" side of the initial package selection, is the tool that is generally suggested for an everyday package management tool. It can be used to install, remove, purge, and hold back (package won't be upgraded even if newer version is available) individual packages and dependencies. It notifies the user of recommended and suggested packages and offers menus to handle situations where more than one package meets a particular dependency, or to resolve dependency conflicts. However, it's extremely slow, has a very user unfriendly interface, and is impossible to navigate. dselect is single-handedly responsible for turning countless users away from Debian.

aptitude, like dselect, has a curses interface, but, unlike dselect, it can search through the package database at a reasonable speed, and its interface is much easier to use. aptitude also allows operations to be performed on the command line, much like apt-get.

synaptic, formerly raptor, is a GUI frontend to apt-get. It is friendlier (or at least prettier) to use, but suffers from the same limitations as apt-get. It also has a fairly robust, though slightly confusing, means of filtering the package list displayed.

Originally created for the now-defunct Stormix, stormpkg is a GNOME-based APT GUI which can handle full dependency management, package list filtering based on package name or description to ease the search for particular packages, and it can edit the sources.list file. It seems friendly, but still has some stability issues to work out, like not crashing when someone double-clicks on a package name.