root disk
Enrique Zanardi asked about whether it would be useful to have PPP
on the installation boot disk, for cases where the boot kernel (or
any kernel) has no access to a floppy drive or CD. PPP might be
useful, but I don't know if it would be worth the space. Almost
anywhere that you can get a fast enough serial link to be useful,
you can have a parallel connection instead.
A PLIP driver on the installation boot disk would be a godsend.
I have successfully installed Red Hat on laptops via PLIP twice,
once because the laptop had no CD drive, the other because it
had a PCMCIA floppy and (also) no CD drive. Red Hat installation
via PLIP is painful only because Red Hat installation software is
so buggy; the PLIP connection, once configured, is a positive joy.
(FWIW: RH5.1's bug is that it turns on "ifconfig plip0 arp", so you
have to turn it on at the other end too, abnormally.)
plip.o on x86 is only 12Kbytes; ppp.o is 26K. PLIP is much easier
to configure than PPP. I guess you can tell how I would vote.
Nathan Myers
ncm@nospam.cantrip.org
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