slink boot disk notes
hey -- just tried a debian install for the first time, from floppies, on
a low memory system.
one oddity: lowmemrd/linuxrc.c doesn't allow you to specify a minix partition
if one was written previously. You can't choose the "exit" option without first
rewriting the partition. Since it takes about 40-60 min on this 486 to
uncompress the floppy & write the partition, this is an enormous loss anytime
some minor thing goes wrong later in the install. Perhaps there should be
an option to pick a minix partition if one was written previously. Perhaps
also for initializing the swap partition. No need to run mkswap every time.
I also discovered (the hard way) that the base floppies that are http linked on
the slink install guide for i386 are not the same as the i386 floppies on the
slink ftp site. I grabbed one from the web site & the rest from the ftp site,
with the result that the base floppies silently failed to install. The unzip
failed because the 1st & 2nd floppies don't fit together, which generated no
error message, but asked me to install the base system again. dinstall appears
to do some sort of header checking on the floppies, but it failed to catch
this. I didn't discover it before merging the files by hand with dd.
b.c.
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