Hello all,<br><br>Further thought on Richard's installation of Debian on his Vaio laptop brought the realization that it was a special case of "Installation on a Constrained System - PC with bootable floppy and network access". Indeed, the method I suggested to him (and which worked well enough, happily) was sort of overkill. Three floppies from the Debian project (
boot.img, root.img and net-drivers-1.img OR net-drivers-2.img) would have done the job just as effectively as tomsrtbt with download of net installer kernel and initial root disk, then booting from a GRUB boot disk. The technique was at the front of my mind because my third floppy disk, net-drivers, had just died. So, I had to figure out something that would work with just two floppies. It's August vacation here, and all the local computer shops are closed.
<br><br>It seems to me that this particular case is an example of our general case - installing an actively-maintained distro on a system that is resource-constrained to the extent that a standard boot-from-CD/DVD scenario is impossible.
<br><br>I'm about to launch into Drupal-speak, so some background first. If you are familiar with Drupal or if you don't care, you can skip the next paragraph.<br><br>The RULE project website is based on Drupal. Drupal is a content management system written in PHP/MySQL that is used to build websites. Drupal organizes content into "nodes". A simplified but workable definition is that a node is a "chunk" of information for display on the website. The most basic Drupal node one usually works with is the "story". It is a page of the website. However, it is also possible to build other structures with Drupal, and one of the most useful is a "book". As you can probably guess, a book is composed of multiple stories, and provides a structure in which each stories (pages) can be organized. Using correct terminology, when talking about books we start referring to "book pages" instead of stories, but the differences are minor. A story is a single page that stands alone. A book page exists as part of a larger book of multiple pages.
<br><br>I am going to proceed directly to write a story about the technique behind Richard's installation. However, I propose to the group that a better structure for future expansion would be a book:<br><br>Book: GNU/Linux Installation on Constrained Systems (I'm not wedded to the title - we can certainly change it.)
<br><ul><li>Each book page will present a technique for a GNU/Linux installation on a particular type of constrained system. For example: floppy disk/net installation of Debian for a system with no CDROM drive. Anyone can write a book page. Indeed, groups of authors can write one together.
</li><li>Comments on the that page can be, well, comments.</li><li>However, comments could also be installation reports. That is, each comment could be a report on an attempt, successful or not, to install a GNU/Linux distro on that type of constrained system.
<br></li></ul>The point being to organize the information so that a year from now, after we have attracted lots of input, it will be possible to quickly "drill down" to a specific technique for a given hardware configuration.
<br><br>Your comments and thoughts are appreciated as always.<br><br>Regards,<br>C David Rigby<br>