Installing on old computers (WAS: Re: Time to rewrite dpkg)
> methods are phasing out is just plainly wrong. Currently we have three
> ways of booting the installation system: bootable CDs (requires a modern
> BIOS), floppy disk and bootp (requires a netword card with the proper
> ROM, and a bootp+tftp server on the same network). Our bootable CDs use a
> floppy image for booting, the same "resc1440.bin" floppy image that's
> used on a floppy based installation. That means two of our three methods
> (and I dare to say the third one is used on <5% of Debian installations)
> use the same "rescue" floppy disk. I won't say that's "pashing out". ;-)
I think the installation still lacks some.. I have a friend using 3
computers at home, and I got him to try installing Debian at one of
them (instead of Red Hat that he tried earlier). On a computer
without CD-ROM one has to start by disk, but that's ok. Then you get
the option of NFS, but not FTP! Since the other computers are all MS
Windows... NFS is not an option, so we went on with the base disks
(having to rewrite half of them because of read errors). After that,
you off course get ftp-opportunity. But then, if you ftp from a
windows-machine that simply reads the CD or a copy of it on the HD,
it will all fail, because of the symlinks disappearing!
On Red Hat, you can use one disk to get the ftp opportunity, and
symlinks wont destroy it! So, what could I tell him, to grab each
package by hand???
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