www.debian.org

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0
Installation Documentation Index

Installation Manual - Installation instructions for the Debian GNU/Linux system.

Please read this before you begin, especially if you are new to Linux. These manuals are designed to get you started quickly by explaining things you could not possibly already know without previous experience with Linux and with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It will save you hours of frustration if you begin here and patiently read the fine manual from cover to cover.

Also available in PDF and plain text.

The cfdisk and parted manuals.

These explain how to use the Linux cfdisk and parted disk partitioning software. The installer program will let you start either of these to repartition your disk. Typically on ia64 you should partition with parted, and create GPT partition tables. cfdisk can be used to create MSDOS partition tables, if you prefer.

Release Notes

What has changed since the last release, and detailed information on upgrading to the new release.

Also available in plain text.

dselect Beginner's Guide - Software package management tool instructions.

dselect is a tool used for selecting and deselecting which software packages you would like to have installed on your computer. It takes a little bit of fore-knowledge to use it confidently the first time you encounter it face to face. This is recommended reading.

Also available in plain text.

Translated Documentation
On the Internet, links to translated installation documentation are at http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/installmanual.
If you are reading this from an FTP archive or CD-ROM, you may find translations of the Installation Manual, Release Notes, and dselect Beginner's Guide in language subdirectories:
Online Documentation available at www.debian.org

Here you will find World Wide Web links to more information than will fit on a CD-ROM. It's more than anyone can read in a month!

PDF documents may be viewed with one of many PDF viewers, run apt-get install pdf-viewer to see a list of available alternatives. Please read these documents on your computer whenever possible, rather than printing them. PDF documents are searchable and many have a clickable table of contents. The typesetting is publication quality. Save trees! Electrons recycle much more readily than paper products.