Re: Installing debian from floppies.
Steve Preston writes ("Re: Installing debian from floppies."):
> Ok, great. I got dpkg-1.0.5.tar.gz and built dpkg-split on my HP-UX
> machine.
>
> {ASIDE:
> BTW, is there a bug mailing list? I don't know how much it
> matters, but these were the problems I had building dpkg-split,
> which required dpkg-deb and md5sum:
There is a bug reporting address. See the Debian Project's WWW pages
for details. (http://www.debian.org/)
> (1) 'configure' initially guessed wrong about a lot of things,
> until I removed config.cache.
This is probably a packaging mistake. I shouldn't ship a coopy of
config.cache.
> (2) (lib/lock.c) flock() is a BSD function; not POSIX. If you
> want to be POSIX, you should use fcntl().
*sigh* OK, I'll rewrite it to use fcntl.
> (3) (lib/compat.c) In the function strsignal(), not all libc's
> have a sys_siglist[] array.
What are you supposed to do if they haven't ? If you send me code to
put in compat.c (I can probably write an autoconf macro to test for
this) I'll add it in.
> END-ASIDE}
>
> So anyway, I've been able to split .deb files.
>
> > If you make a pile of floppies that have the .deb files (split where
> > appropriate using dpkg-split) on msdos filesystems you should be able
> > to use dselect's `floppy disk' installation method.
>
> Question: I presume dpkg will tell the user to switch floppies if it
> cannot find the appropriate .deb file on the current one. Does this
> work with whole as well as split .deb files? In other words, can I
> use dselect to select a bunch of packages, spread (and possibly split)
> across several floppies?
Yes. dselect tells you which packages are left to install and you
just keep feeding it floppies.
> Question: Is there some way to tell dpkg which floppies have which
> .deb files? I am thinking that, when I am writing the dos files, I
> could also create a map file that says, for example, that the gdb
> package is on the 'devel3' floppy, etc. Then, I copy this map file to
> my linux hard disk, and dpkg uses it to tell me which floppy to insert
> next.
Hmm. I'll think about this.
Ian.
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