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You may be wondering why you should go through a process of building a CD image yourself rather than simply downloading the appropriate images from a Debian CD image mirror somewhere. The answer has been that there are many Debian mirrors world-wide that store the complete collection of Debian packages. If these mirrors were to also store the CD images the extra space required is essentially wasted space and so many of the Debian mirrors do not keep the CD images.
There are a smaller number of Debian hosts on the Internet that do maintain CD images. These hosts are often not local and the amount of bandwidth required to download the images from these smaller number of mirrors is quite significant.
According to the Debian GNU/Linux CD Images Frequently Asked Questions page (http://cdimage.debian.org/faq.html) by using a distributed approach based on the network of Debian package mirrors the required bandwidth to the CD image mirrors is reduced by over 99%!
Nonetheless, today you may find local Debian hosts mirroring the CD images also. If that is the case then it is easier to simply download the actual images rather than building the images as described in the rest of this chapter. In Australia, for example, the primary Debian mirror also mirrors the CD images (from http://cdimage.debian.org/cd-images/. So for those in .au and .nz it is perhaps easiest to simply download one of the following:
$ wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/debian-cd/3.0_r1/i386/debian-30r1-i386-binary-1_NONUS.iso $ wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/debian-cd/3.0_r1/i386/debian-30r1-i386-binary-1.iso
Then burn the image to CD using whatever tools you have at your disposal. For release 3 there are 7 CDs. The NONUS alternative (which contains items that can not be exported directly from the US) is only relevant to the first CD.
