What's in this directory?

These are files containing the installer and other software for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The files in this directory are specifically for the armel architecture.

How do I use these files?

The files here are complete ISO images, ready to use.

Once you have downloaded all the ISO images you want, you will typically need to write them to installation media.

What size and type of media will I need?

The images described here are sized to be written to writeable DVD media at a minimum, but may be written to larger media if needed.

There are lots of files here! Do I need all of them?

In most cases it is not necessary to download and use all of these images to be able to install Debian on your computer. Debian comes with a massive set of software packages, hence why it takes so many disks for a complete set. Most typical users only need a small subset of those software packages.

Initially, you will only need to download and use the first image of a set (labelled as debian-something-1 to be able to start the Debian installer and set up Debian on your computer. If there are more images available here (labelled debian-something-2, debian-something-3, etc.), they contain the extra packages that can be installed on a Debian system (as mentioned previously). They will not be bootable and are entirely optional. If you have a fast Internet connection, you're most likely better off installing any desired extra packages directly from the Debian mirrors on the Internet instead of by using these extra images.

How can I verify my download is correct and exactly what has been created by Debian?

There are files here (SHA1SUMS, SHA256SUMS, etc.) which contain checksums of the images. These checksum files are also signed - see SHA1SUMS.sign, SHA256SUMS.sign, etc. Once you've downloaded an image, you can check:

that its checksum matches that expected from the checksum file; and
that the checksum file has not been tampered with.

For more information about how to do these steps, read the verification guide.

Only the first few images are available! Where are the rest?

We don't store/serve the full set of ISO images for all architectures, to reduce the amount of space taken up on the mirrors. You can use the jigdo tool to recreate the missing ISO images instead.

Why the 9.2.1 update?

After the 9.2.0 release was made and published, a bug was found with the sorting of packages in the full DVD, BD and DLBD sets. Due to a glitch on release day, popularity contest data was not available and this caused packages to be sorted incorrectly.

This may seem like a comparatively minor issue, but it broke an important feature for some users. After the core set of packages needed for the installer, desktops, etc. are placed onto the first disc in a given set, we normally organise packages in order of decreasing popularity such that most users will typically never need to use more than the first 2 or 3 DVDs (for example). This bug broke that feature, meaning that even quite popular packages could have ended up on DVD#14 due to random sorting.

The 9.2.1 build fixes this bug. The build scripts have also been updated to ensure this bug cannot happen again in future - the build will abort if there is a problem updating popcon data.

If you have already installed using 9.2.0, you are unlikely to be affected by this bug. Live images and netinst images are totally unaffected. Apologies for any problems caused for users.