Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 23:04

How To Download Debian CDs, DVDs and Old Versions with Jigdo Made Easy


We know that Debian in every release is distributed in multiple volumes of CDs and DVDs which are numbered 1, 2, 3 and so on. One Debian release may amount to 20 GigaBytes total or equal to dozens of CDs or DVDs.  Officially, Debian provides only CD1 and DVD1, while the rest of CD2 to CD50, DVD2 to DVD10, not provided in the Debian server and neither Debian mirrors. Although CD1 or DVD1 is sufficient to install Debian to computer, some people, like teachers and students, might want the additional CDs or DVDs for no internet access purposes. The official way to download the additional CDs or DVDs is by using a program called Jigdo. This tutorial explains how to do that simply and easily picture by picture.


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Benefits

  • Able to download additional Debian images from DVD-2 to DVD-10
  • Able to download older versions of Debian
  • Faster than normal direct download
  • Clever, as it actually creates an ISO by downloading individual packages from available repositories then rejoining them
  • Does not waste community servers' resources

 

Requirements

  • Enough free disk space.
  • Internet access (unlimited and fast one is strongly recommended).
  • Access to a computer where jigdo can run.
  • Basic knowledge in using command lines.

We will practice this using Debian 11 Bullseye released 2021 which for both CDs and DVDs choices, available in more than 8 architectures including amd64 and i386. You might find this article and apply it to any previous or later versions of Debian.

 

Debian Links

These are the download links of three different Debian versions today, namely, 11 (Stable), 10 (Oldstable), and 9 (Oldoldstable). Please remember that the contents would change in the future and might also removed permanently by The Debian Community. However, you can learn and adapt the links for the future. Thanks to Jigdo, you can still download old versions of Debian for a foreseeable future when the image files no more available.

Debian 11 Bullseye released 2021 ("current")

Debian 10 Buster released 2019 ("latest-oldstable")

Debian 9 Stretch released 2017 ("latest-oldoldstable")

Old Versions Download Center


How It Works

What we will actually do? We will use jigdo, a special internet download manager, to smartly create a Debian ISO image file in our computer disk drive by downloading separate Debian packages from nearest Debian repositories and then automatically assembling them. This resulting in same result as downloading an ISO image file but smartly reducing The Debian Community's resources to provide massively expensive multiple CDIMAGE servers. We will download one of these five Debian DVDs:

 

Step 1. Install Jigdo Program

Do this command line on your Terminal. This will result in a new command line on your Ubuntu or Debian system called jigdo-lite.

$ sudo apt-get install jigdo-file


 

Step 2. Download Debian Using Jigdo

Copy a .jigdo link and paste it as jigdo-lite's option on your Terminal like example below → answer first question by pressing Enter → answer second question by typing this link http://deb.debian.org/debian/ → download starts → wait for the download process to finish. How long this process will take time depends on your internet access.

$ jigdo-lite https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/jigdo-dvd/debian-11.1.0-amd64-DVD-2.jigdo



Step 3. Debian Downloaded Successfully

Once finished, you will get the complete ISO image file corresponds to the jigdo file. For example, if you downloaded debian-11-amd64-DVD-2.jigdo, then you get debian-11-amd64-DVD-2.iso ready to use. Repeat Step 1 to Step 3 for another volume(s) of Debian DVDs.



This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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