Re: Essential bloat [was: Debian on CDROM]
On Thu, Oct 14, 1999 at 11:12:03AM -0700, Darren O. Benham wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 14, 1999 at 05:15:07PM +0200, Goswin Brederlow wrote:
> > Nobody in his right mind uses disks anymore. You eigther have a
> > network to somewehre (internet or local net) or you store the stuff
> > on a CD, zip or partition.
>
> That strikes me as extremely rude! I have 20 rack mount computers
> here that use an onboard ethernet card that MUST have recompiled
> kernel (and and updated driver that's not currently in 2.2.12 source
> tree). We didn't want CD roms in them... My only choice is disk until
> I get past the "base" install. After that, I can install my custom
> kernel and use apt to get ther rest of Debian.
>
> Are you telling me that because I've chosen not to buy CDroms for
> these boxes and chose a motherboard with a newer Enet chip that I'm
> not allowed to have Debian...?
installing base from floppy is not your only choice.
you could keep one well-supported NIC (e.g. a 3c905 or even ne-2000)
spare and just insert it in a slot while you're building a system. if
you need to build two or more systems simultaneously then you'll need
several spare NICs.
(with a lot more work, you could even set up bootp, tftp, and nfs-mount
the rescue disk image as /. probably not worth the effort unless you're
doing hundreds of builds)
alternatively, putting a custom kernel on the rescue floppy (and a custom
modules.tgz on the drivers floppy) isn't very difficult.
from memory, you do something very much like this:
1. compile and install kernel (optionally, don't install it...just extract
your custom kernel-image.deb under /tmp)
2. insert rescue floppy
3. mcopy /path/to/vmlinuz a:LINUX
4. sync
5. tar cfz /tmp/modules.tgz /lib/modules/VERSION
6. insert drivers floppy
7. mcopy /tmp/modules.tgz a:
8. sync
either of these options are less hassle than making 6 or 8 or 12 install
floppies. and a LOT less hassle than swapping all of those floppies
while you build 20 systems.
that's it for today's lesson in Applied Laziness 101 :-)
> P.S. Taking apart all 20 boxen to install a CDRom just for the
> installation is not an option.
yeah, that would be a pain.
craig
--
craig sanders
Reply to: