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Re: Essential bloat [was: Debian on CDROM]



"Darren O. Benham" <gecko@debian.org> writes:


> 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...?   

> P.S.  Taking apart all 20 boxen to install a CDRom just for the
> installation is not an option.  

Can you put the modified kernel on the floppy and use the net to fetch
the base image.  (In this case, you could also use a huge base image
with most or all of the packages you need preinstalled.)

(I've done stuff like this before with my old laptop which had no
CDROM.  I refuse to feed the machine 6 base floppies, so I usually end
up using PCMCIA enet to d/l the base system.)


Still, if we are doing away with the base floppies, we should make the
network install of base.tgz a little easier to figure out, and add FTP
and HTTP support.  The "snarf" program is small and can fetch files
from ftp and http urls; it could be added to boot-floppies to get this
functionality.  (I haven't looked at the 2.2 floppies yet, maybe they
do this already.)


Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu


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