Re: too big packages?
On Sat, 10 Apr 1999, virtanen wrote:
> Anyone knows a cheap way to get debian packages, which are too big for a
> floppy to a computer, which isn't networked and has got only a cdrom
> driver and a floppy disk driver? Is it possible to 'pkzip' deb-packages
> in a dos-machine to make them smaller and 'unzip' them in the
> debian-machine?
>
> Is it possible to format 1.44 meg floppies into bigger ones so that a
> (win)do(w)s- and the debian-machine both can read the floppies?
No, you scarcely get any benefit from zipping debian package. It is
already compressed using nearly same algorithm - gzip.
Yes, it is possible to format DOS floppies up to 2.0M. Read info
documentation for mtools package, it should contain references to DOS
software, it is compatible with. But scarcely it would help much.
In my experience, extra-density floppies are unrelaiable.
You can use traditional Unix software like tar (with -M option) or
split to split package into pieces. You'll need to get DOS versions
of these tools. It is easy. look to http://www.delorie.com (or
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/gnu/djgpp) or www.cygnus.com for win32 only
version. There is also 16-bit version of those utilities which run on
286 and XT machines under DOS.
Another way around is to get DOS archiver which support multivolume
archives and has linux version.
ARJ do support multivolume archives, but Linux unarj doesn't,
so I reccommend RAR. You can easily find shareware version of RAR
on any DOS/Windows ftp site. Linux version is included in non-free tree
of DEBIAN.
--------------------------------------------------
Victor Wagner vitus@ice.ru
Programmer Office:7-(095)-964-0380
Institute for Commerce Home: 7-(095)-135-46-61
Engineering http://www.ice.ru/~vitus
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