The system will now ask you if you want to use the pre-rolled
software configurations offered by Debian. You can always choose
package-by-package what you want to install on your new machine.
This is the purpose of the dselect program, described below. But
this can be a long task with the thousands of packages available in
Debian!
So, you have the ability to choose _tasks_ or _profiles_ instead. A
_task_ is work you will do with the machine, such as “Perl
programming” or “HTML authoring” or “Chinese word processing.” You
can choose several tasks. A _profile_ is a category your machine
will be a member of, such as “Network server” or “Personal
workstation.” Unlike with tasks, you can choose only one profile.
To summarize, if you are in a hurry, choose one profile. If you have
more time, choose the Custom profile and select a set of tasks. If
you have plenty of time and want very precise control on what is or
is not installed, skip this step and use the full power of dselect.
Soon, you will enter into dselect. If you selected tasks or
profiles, remember to skip the “Select” step of dselect, because the
selections have already been made.
A word of warning about the size of the tasks as they are displayed:
The size shown for each task is the sum of the sizes of its
packages. If you choose two tasks that share some packages, the
actual disk requirement will be less than the sum of the sizes for
the two tasks.
Once you’ve added both logins (root and personal), you’ll be dropped
into the dselect program. dselect allows you to select _packages_ to
be installed on your system. If you have a CD-ROM or hard disk
containing the additional Debian packages that you want to install
on your system, or if you are connected to the Internet, this will
be useful to you right away. Otherwise, you may want to quit dselect
and start it later after you have transported the Debian package
files to your system. You must be the superuser (root) when you run
dselect. Information on how to use dselect is given in section 3.20.