[conspire] successful install, at last

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> My purpose for using a computer is to accomplish certain tasks. 
> Although *ux required my learning some basic sysadmin functions
> sometime around 1985.   That said, including my most recent
> experience, being sysadmin on *ux is probably easier than dealing
> with most IT departments to fix some *doz problem.  Yes I was aware
> that there were various ways to get aps that were not in the "target"
> release but where in other releases.  However, it appeared to be
> easier to try use *ubuntu.  

OK, sure, try that for a while.

When you wish to try Debian again, with access to cutting-edge
applications, the relatively easy way is to start with one of the
quarterly Siduction installable live ISOs.  Or you can use my
apt-pinning trick to run Debian-testing with optional access to
Debian-unstable packages whenever you want it.

> BTW, the normal downloaded *ubuntu.iso file is a live CD that has so
> you can take for a (limited) test drive before running the installer. 
> As a plus, while the installer was running, I could, for example, open
> firefox and read the email and then watch a video with a crowd of
> people holding signs.

Yeah, lots of distros have official live-CD installer images including
Debian, which has one called Debian Live,
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/ .

(Personally, I'd always prefer Siduction _over_ Debian Live, but some
people claim to be nervous about something based on Debian-unstable.)

> Since that live CD includes partition tools and dd and other things, I could use it as the rescue disk.  

Yeah, you _could_.  But it's not great for that.

> I would be interested in what should be the minimum selection of tools
> on a rescue disk?

Well, what do you want to be able to do?

> A related question is, how difficult is it to create a new live CD?  
> I mean creating a new ISO file.  Or modifying an existing ISO.  The
> answer could be as short as, "It ain't easy".  Or maybe it really
> isn't too difficult.  Then one could create a custom rescue drive.

The verbs you want to search on for any given distro are probably either
'remaster' or 'respin'.  So, for example, searching 'remaster debian'
brings up a bunch of links of interest.  Which see.

But personally, I'd just use one of the excellent maintenance-focussed
distros that already exist.  (And, again, _if_ I encountered an irritating
lack of good Linux driver support in, say, SuperRescueCD for some
spanking-new chipset, say, a SATA chip that is really new, I'd reach for
Siduction because of its very current kernel, hence driver collection
and hardware-recognition.)


> I note that I said ,"CD" in several places out of habit.  I really 
> meant USB.

Yeah, I have the same problem.  What we really always meant by 'live CD'
was 'live distro', so I find myself belatedly having to correct that.

(And, no, really actually don't mean live _USB_.  There are many other,
additional ways to boot a live distro, some of them faster and better,
such as netbooting.)