Even if we require extra packages and need to use the DVD, Debian recommends downloading only the first DVD image (1 of 3 at the time of this writing) and download the rest, if required by the installer. For a simple standard installation we should be fine with a CD image. even smaller CD images for network install (also known as mini.iso)ĭebian generally offers two flavours of these: a CD image, which is around 650 MB (actually, for amd64 the current stable 'Buster' image is 694 MB) and a bunch of DVD images up to 4.4 GB in size.

When it comes to installation media Debian (and its derivative distribution Ubuntu) provides various installation media types for different needs: However, there is a much simpler solution to bootstrap Debian/Ubuntu installation in QEMU over the network without downloading a single ISO.

The typical way to do this is to download the installation media (usually some ISO image), attach it to the VM instance, and start the installation process. Sometimes you might need to quickly spin up a VM for some testing or safe experiments. Without downloading any installation media

Install qemu ubuntu