Thanks for your comments Richard. I agree that Franz has done an awesome job of maintaining and expanding slinky.<br><br>On a practical note, I did learn something about Debian yesterday that may be useful to you.<br><br><div>
<span class="gmail_quote">On 8/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Richard Kweskin</b> <<a href="mailto:rkwesk@hellug.gr">rkwesk@hellug.gr</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
> In response to some remarks from Richard and James, I note that:<br>><br>> 1. Debian can still be installed from floppy diskette. I just<br>> installed the latest version on my ancient dual PII-333 system (which we
<br>> used for a while to host some RULE-project files - that was some years ago).<br>> It required three floppies - boot.img, root.img and net-drivers-1.img.<br><br>I have these floppies but couldn't get my cdrom using the pcmcia interface recognised at that early stage.
</blockquote><div><br>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.<br><br>Basically:<br><ol><li>Grab your favorite floppy-based mini-distro and use it to create an ext2 partition on your hard disk. I like Tomsrtbt (
<a href="http://www.toms.net/rb/">http://www.toms.net/rb/</a>). You may prefer something else, and something that provides network access will make things quite a bit easier. That depends on your hardware.<br></li><li>See this link:
<a href="http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch05s01.html#boot-initrd">http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch05s01.html#boot-initrd</a> where the needed files are discussed. Basically, you need the net install vmlinuz and
initrd.gz from the Debian archive netboot directory.</li><li>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:
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Creating-a-GRUB-boot-floppy">http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Creating-a-GRUB-boot-floppy</a>. Other sections of the same manual describe the commands for using grub's command line to actually boot the kernel with ramdisk.
<br></li></ol>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->
<br><br>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.
<br></div><br></div>
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.<br><br>Ciao<br>CDR<br>