First download and create either the boot / install floppies from the current stable distribution or burn the minimal install cd (about 60MB). At the time of writting (June 2004) there is no way to directly install the testing distribution (slight lie - you could try the beta text installer but there are warnings not to unless you are developing it) so you have to install the stable version first and then upgrade. This is not a big problem since the initiall install is tiny. We are going to do a network install rather than download the whole lot up front since that ensures that you get the latest sources and don't have to upgrade basically everything immediatly after your install. The problem with a network install though is that you have to do a bit more work yourself.

The debain installer is given a lot of stick but it isn't all that bad really and will probably get quite a bit better when the text installer under development is released (probably with the release of sarge). Either way just follow the instructions in the install and / or read the installation instructions which can be found on the debian site. The instructions on the debian site are very complete which makes them rather long, more than a little dull and in places irrelevent to what we are trying to do.

You should now have a very minimal working install of debian (basically little more than a kernel and a few utilities). Open the file:

/etc/apt/sources.list

in a text editor. Sadly probably the only editor currently installed is vi which is rather hard to use. Change all instances of "stable" into "testing" then save and exit.

Run the commands

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

which will download the packages required to turn your stable install into a testing install. As a quick aside you might be wondering why we are "tracking" testing rather than stable. Quite simply because stable is as old as the hills and lacks a great deal of modern applications. Saying that though it is also as solid as a rock.

Once that is done run the command

tasksel

and select the groups of packages you would like installed. This is where the problems started though. The "desktop_environment" task would not install in my version of testing since there were unmet dependencies with some of the KDE packages (currently there is no easy way to install KDE in the testing release). Select what ever you can using task select and install that. It will likely take quite a while to download and install and will halt at a few points to ask you to supply configuration. Note: Quite a few hardened debian fans would quite like to see tasksel and dselect just quitly die a death. I agree with the feeling towards dselect but I am not so sure about tasksel; this might change over time but for now I think tasksel is quite useful.

At the end of downloading an installing packages using "tasksel" you may or may not have a working desktop. In my case it was fairly obviously not going to be that simple and required me to download many more packages. Essentially tasksel only downloads the bare minimum to get GNOME working and misses off many useful applicaitons whichyou have to add later. This is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because you don't end up with a system bloated to with in an inch of its life and a curse because its a pain to have to manual install everything.