a more simple question?

[Tony Baechler]

On 3/4/2013 6:47 PM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> That is exactly what I hope I will not need to do.
> although I feared that might be needful.
> I have 6 or more DVD images of the entire debian squeeze structure. None of
> which got used because someone else in America put some of debian on a hard
> drive and mailed it to me.

Actually, doing a new install isn't that hard.  It mostly does the right 
thing automatically.  you only need the first DVD.

> I have no idea fully what is here, and again not finding the in person
> training have no real way of discovering without risking damaging the
> install already here.

Even if you break something, fixing it isn't that hard in most cases.

> It is funny, since Paul brought up the 63 k packages in debian.
> I asked on the Debian discussion list about installing the entire thing, so
> I could in theory examine the say 20 media players included, or discover
> programs I might not know exist that might be useful.
> I was told that no no one really uses all of it. In fact even on the speak
> up list Samuel would say, you do not need more than the first couple of images.
> What I do not understand though is why?


Well, why not use Wordstar instead of WordPerfect?  Why not use w3m instead 
of Lynx?  You wouldn't install every DOS or Windows program out there.  The 
difference is that Linux distros have everything nicely packaged for you so 
you don't have to install it from source and/or fetch it from some unknown site.