Re: Making a boot floppy
Dan,
I don't want this subject to become just more noise, but your idea of
using grep with bin is a good one, and worth remembering.
I'm a newbie to Debian, and presently doing more sys admin than I prefer,
but I've been `computing' since the early 1960s. Documentation has
improved little since then, but now we have more powerful seach machines.
There's a lot of good documentation for Linux and Debian, but much or most
of it is appropriate for instances where everything goes according to
plan. What's missing is most often provided by email lists, but usually
with a lot of trial and error.
What I haven't found yet is a condensed version of things that a slightly
more than newbie would want to do, like mkboot after installing a new
kernel. Maybe someone with better search skills than I can turn that up on
the Debian site, but I couldn't.
I know now that if you make partitions for things like /var and later want
to mount them via nfs that you can't mount / and expect to dive into
subdirectories under /var, but finding that in the documentation isn't
easy - and the nohide option is mostly worthless from my experience.
My pet peeve is the fact that error messages are not identified with a
line number and source file that emits them. This is the ultimate means
to finding a problem.
But hey, any OS is worse than Linux!
--
Sincerely,
David Smead
http://www.amplepower.com.
On 6 May 2002, Dan Griswold wrote:
> Walter Tautz <wtautz@math.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
>
> > On Fri, 3 May 2002, David Smead wrote:
> >
> > > Sorry for being so unskilled -
> > >
> > > I just installed a new kernel and would like to make a boot floppy. I've
> > > wasted an hour on google and debian looking for how that is done. I.e.
> > > shove a floppy into the drive and type .... ENTER.
> > >
> >
> > whenever one runs into this difficulty, short of asking on this list,
> > you should endeavour to run locate <keyname> where keyname here could
> > have been boot. This may have led to the location of command that
> > may seem appropriate. OR if the command is not on the system, doing
> > apt-cache search boot may have been helpful.
> >
>
> Good suggestion, although in this particular case ("boot"):
>
> $ locate boot|wc -l
> 973
>
> $ apt-cache search boot|wc -l
> 139
>
> In other words, a lot of hits to look through. So, I would add that it
> can be helpful to refine the search:
>
> $ locate boot | grep bin
>
> For apt-cache, I see no obvious refining of the search for someone who
> doesn't already know the name of the package that contains mkboot,
> viz., debianutils.
>
> $ apt-cache search debianutils
> debianutils - Miscellaneous utilities specific to Debian.
>
> But since debianutils is part of base, I guess it should be installed
> already.
>
> Another help can be the apropos command. See the man page.
>
> In short, I think the OP's original question was reasonable in this
> instance. Yet Walter's suggestions (perhaps with refinements) should
> be heeded, as they work in the vast majority of cases (and _may_ have
> led the OP to the answer, although not certainly).
>
> Just asking for a little sympathy for the newbies (and not so newbies)
> out there,
>
> Dan
>
>
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