This manual was created for Sarge's debian-installer, based on the Woody installation manual for boot-floppies, which was based on earlier Debian installation manuals, and on the Progeny distribution manual which was released under GPL in 2003. This document is written in DocBook XML. Output formats are generated by various programs using information from the docbook-xml and docbook-xsl packages. In order to increase the maintainability of this document, we use a number of XML features, such as entities and profiling attributes. These play a role akin to variables and conditionals in programming languages. The XML source to this document contains information for each different architecture — profiling attributes are used to isolate certain bits of text as architecture-specific. If you have problems or suggestions regarding this document, you should probably submit them as a bug report against the package debian-installer-manual. See the reportbug package or read the online documentation of the Debian Bug Tracking System. It would be nice if you could check the open bugs against debian-installer-manual to see whether your problem has already been reported. If so, you can supply additional corroboration or helpful information to XXXX@bugs.debian.org, where XXXX is the number for the already-reported bug. Better yet, get a copy of the DocBook source for this document, and produce patches against it. The DocBook source can be found at the debian-installer WebSVN. If you're not familiar with DocBook, don't worry: there is a simple cheatsheet in the manuals directory that will get you started. It's like html, but oriented towards the meaning of the text rather than the presentation. Patches submitted to the debian-boot mailing list (see below) are welcomed. For instructions on how to check out the sources via SVN, see README from the source root directory. Please do not contact the authors of this document directly. There is also a discussion list for &d-i;, which includes discussions of this manual. The mailing list is debian-boot@lists.debian.org. Instructions for subscribing to this list can be found at the Debian Mailing List Subscription page; or you can browse the Debian Mailing List Archives online. This document was originally written by Bruce Perens, Sven Rudolph, Igor Grobman, James Treacy, and Adam Di Carlo. Sebastian Ley wrote the Installation Howto. Many, many Debian users and developers contributed to this document. Particular note must be made of Michael Schmitz (m68k support), Frank Neumann (original author of the Amiga install manual), Arto Astala, Eric Delaunay/Ben Collins (SPARC information), Tapio Lehtonen, and Stéphane Bortzmeyer for numerous edits and text. We have to thank Pascal Le Bail for useful information about booting from USB memory sticks. Miroslav Kuře has documented a lot of the new functionality in Sarge's debian-installer. Extremely helpful text and information was found in Jim Mintha's HOWTO for network booting (no URL available), the Debian FAQ, the Linux/m68k FAQ, the Linux for SPARC Processors FAQ, the Linux/Alpha FAQ, amongst others. The maintainers of these freely available and rich sources of information must be recognized. The section on chrooted installations in this manual () was derived in part from documents copyright Karsten M. Self. The section on installations over plip in this manual () was based on the PLIP-Install-HOWTO by Gilles Lamiral. All trademarks are property of their respective trademark owners.