Re: Still no base tarball

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

Thank you for understanding my concerns.

As a case in point, today's experience with a friend:

My neighbor was given a "junk" SCSI based P90 machine. It will not boot
from the CD, so that path is out. It will not boot a Debian rescue disk.
(I haven't figured out whether it is disabled in hardware, or the LILO
install requires an ext2 file system on the boot floppy. My next step
there, is to build a LILO based boot disk as I think the boot process is
chaining to an expected LILO on the floppy...)

It has a RH system installed, and if we can get the root password I can
hack a Debian system into the machine through the floppy. If I can get a
boot floppy to work I'll be able to hack the root password out of the
system and proceed from there, but I may have to move the SCSI drive to my
machine to do that...

Anyway, even with a lot of luck, I'm going to need a set of floppies with
boot, root, and drivers disks and the base system, either on floppies, or
quicker by toasting a CD with the base tarball.

Putting all that asside, the CD install is not available before a release,
so the testing group must resort to more primative methods to bootstrap
the system in an attempt to test the install before it is released.

If we had a way to distribute pre-release CDs to the testing group, that
problem would be solved, but I'm not in favor of Debian becoming a CD only
distribution for single user new installs.

Please, lets not restrict freedom of access to Debian by retiring a well
used and still useful workhorse. It's something we have always done in the
past, so you can't argue it is too difficult to impliment. For restricted
circumstances, a set of links to the base .deb files that defines the
current "base" system might work, although there are Win based starting
points that will not work without the tarball, so that _is_ extra work,
and I'm not really advocating it...

Thanks for your time,

Dwarf
--
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