[Rule] Whither RULE?

[C David Rigby]

Thanks for your comments Richard. I agree that Franz has done an awesome job
of maintaining and expanding slinky.

On a practical note, I did learn something about Debian yesterday that may
be useful to you.

On 8/23/07, Richard Kweskin <rkwesk at hellug.gr> wrote:
>
> > In response to some remarks from Richard and James, I note that:
> >
> >    1. Debian can still be installed from floppy diskette. I just
> >    installed the latest version on my ancient dual PII-333 system (which
> we
> >    used for a while to host some RULE-project files - that was some
> years ago).
> >    It required three floppies - boot.img, root.img and net-drivers-1.img
> .
>
> I have these floppies but couldn't get my cdrom using the pcmcia interface
> recognised at that early stage.


Debian can do a net install from the hard disk, as long as you can download
files onto the hard disk in advance and boot from floppy.

Basically:

   1. Grab your favorite floppy-based mini-distro and use it to create an
   ext2 partition on your hard disk. I like Tomsrtbt (
   http://www.toms.net/rb/). You may prefer something else, and something
   that provides network access will make things quite a bit easier. That
   depends on your hardware.
   2. See this link:
   http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch05s01.html#boot-initrdwhere
the needed files are discussed. Basically, you need the net install
   vmlinuz and initrd.gz from the Debian archive netboot directory.
   3. Create a grub boot floppy, and use it to boot the kernel and load
   the initrd.gz. Now the installer has control and is loaded in RAM. So,
   you can partition the disk as you wish, including removing the partition you
   booted from. Details are here:
   http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Creating-a-GRUB-boot-floppy.
   Other sections of the same manual describe the commands for using grub's
   command line to actually boot the kernel with ramdisk.

The sticking point in all this is the assumption that you can gain network
access from a floppy boot disk. As well, you do not want to damage a Windows
installation before you are confident that a Debian installation has a good
chance of success. Better GNU/Linux than Windows, but better Windows than a
paperweight! (8->

Finally, there is one way of installing on a recalcitrant laptop that has
always worked for me. Remove the hard disk and mount it in a 2.5" to 3.5"
adapter inside a desktop PC, or even an external USB case, then run the
installation against it there. The Debian installer will automatically give
you a kernel tuned to the CPU of the installing system, but you can add a
kernel that matches the notebook's CPU using dselect or apt-get before
returning it to the laptop. Other than the kernel, all of Debian is compiled
against basic i386, IIRC. Once the hard disk is back in the laptop, you'll
need to adjust networking, Xorg, and so forth.

Anyway, if you want amplification or clarification on any of these points,
just let me know. Feel free to send along details on your hardware as well.

Ciao
CDR
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