CS Software - Information about our Debian CDs

We don't sell Debian CDs anymore...

Because of the quick growth of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution (especially, the newest 2.1 release), producing regularly updated CDs of the Debian distribution isn't manageable anymore. So we had to stop selling Debian CDs.

Plans for new "Best of Debian" CDs

Besides its size and its nearly unmanageable amount of packages, Debian GNU/Linux is still one of the best Linux distributions available. A lot of new users that installed the Debian distribution for the first time where impressed by its quality--but most of them where also overwhelmed by the number of packages to choose from.

That's why we are planning to produce Debian CDs which contain only a subset of the Debian distribution. These CDs (probably 1 binary and 1 source CD) will contain everything that's needed to setup and run an average Linux system, but very specialized packages which are only needed by a few single people will be left off the CD to save space. This will simplify the installation and upgrading process not only for newbies, but for all Linux users, and we will be able to include more non-Debian Linux software on the CD like current kernel sources, unpacked HTML documentation, etc.

Since these "Best of Debian" CDs will just contain a "subset" of the complete Debian GNU/Linux system (i.e., no packages are modified, just a few very-specialized packages will be omitted when creating the CDs), the installations will be 100% compatible to the Official Debian system, which means that one can easily download additional packages from the Debian FTP server if some special package should be missing on the CDs.

Getting feedback...

Before we start working on these CDs, we're intrested in knowing how people like the idea. So we'd be happy if you could send us a short email message to schwarz@schwarz-online.com and tell us whether you like the idea or not.

If you're now looking for another place where you can buy Debian CDs until the "Best of Debian" CDs become available, please check out the CD vendor page on Debian's web server.