On Mon, Sep 28, 1998 at 06:31:51PM +0200, Paul Kunysch wrote: > > Hello > > I think it would be nice to have an easier way for a beginner to > get a Linux-distribution from the net. IMO many people are able to > connect a "<100MB-device" to a public internet-computer, download > lots of data and install everything at home. (Or lend the "copies" > to friends.) But most beginners have to decide in advance what files > they will need or they have to download a cdimage completely at > once, split it and "copy /b ... + ... + ..." them on their > DOS-computer at home. > > [ BTW, why is splitting under Solaris slower than downloading?!? > And is there something like "cat bin.004 >> bin.img" under DOS? ] I'm working on this when I have time. I haven't had time this week what with trying to find an apartment, but as half the damned world knows (at least the irc'ing portion) as of 20 minutes ago, I just got an apartment! There was just posted to this list a beginning of an install to loopback device which can be used on a fat filesystem. This is the beginning of what I need to be able to do the large rescue disk, which will make installing Debian without a CD easier. I don't exactly know how I'll distribute this thing yet but the idea is that you should be able to with a dos batch script or by hand or something get a fileset on to a zip disk and syslinux it, and even possibly make a boot disk if your zip disk isn't bootable. Or you could run a batch file on the diskt that essentially does loadlin with the kernel... So far the most complex thing has been how to get linux to use the loopback FS as root and how to build that fs in the first place with the install tools. Both seem to be handled by the install changes posted the other day, I'll check them out after I move next week. Priorities before then are afterstep-classic and epic4 stuff before slink freeze. > I think Debian is one of the few distributions, that might support > a ZIP-Version since we don't _want_ to sell CDs. SuSE even seems to > try to prevent people from installing from ftp. Their base-system, > formerly offered as a "inst-sys.tar" is now offered _directly_ as > "inst-sys/*". I don't know how a beginner should find a way to > restore the correct (recursive!) links, owners and rights after > downloading. (But: I might have missed something important.) > > - Is someone already working on something like this? > > - Is it indeed needed? > > - How should it be implemented? > > Putting all "required" and (most?) "important" archives > on the first disk seems to be logical. > > ( Together with two kernel-images, a ramdisk-image, a listing of files > from other Disks and some WinDos-tools > [md5sum.exe, rsync-client.exe(??)] ) So far I'm working on just install disk. It's not hard to install to a zip disk (note that you'd have to have 2 zip drives or not be installing FROM zip.. Of course my hope is that the large install media could as easily be a fat partition on a hard drive. <shrug>
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