> On the Woody ISOs, what image do I need to put on a floppy in order to make > it boot and begin the installation process? http://www.debian.org/distrib/ Note that there is no 'Install from CD' option on that page. Currently I don't think any released, supported, method exists. Everyone is waiting for woody to release. That has not happened. Unless you can do a network installation you are stuck. (Hoping that will prompt much response to the contrary!) Big question. Do you have high speed network access such as a cable modem, DSL, T1, work lan, etc? If you do then this is what you want. I highly recommend this route. http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/debian-cd/woody-i386-1.iso However, this has been updated since I last pulled it and so your results might vary from mine. But that allows a rather nice and up to date installation by doing the final part of the update from the network directly. Even without doing a full network installation this is 185MB of packages and will get to a working base install system without the network. You will have enough working to apt-install more. But then you will need someplace, CD or network, to get the rest of the system. Note that in the version I used I had to manually specify networking when it asked for kernel modules or I ended up with no networking. It it easier to reinstall with the network module specificied than to try to fix that. I think that has been improved with more recent images. But I will note it for you as a heads up about it. This image is the only one I have found that has really worked out for me. Now I only do network installs. But I do have high speed networking available. As soon as *I* figure out how to make cd's with jigdo then I will probably go back to cd installs again. > I have asked this question a few times before and keep getting answers to > questions I didn't ask and not anyone telling me where to find the image I > need--which was the question. Yes, I have experienced that myself. The problem is that everyone is fearful of pointing to the obvious places because the potato release is so old. That is not really an option. And the new woody has not yet released. So that process is also broken. The best tool is jigdo to be able to get up to date images since they are changing daily. But that is also hard for people to get up to speed on (I am working through that now) and yet the images are changing daily so if you are not using it then you are getting old bits. You have come to debian at a transition time. Everyone is trying to get past the old and on with the new but the new has not yet happened and so there is no easy answer to your question. Which is a shame. Hang in there. The benefit of debian is the incremental update process is clearly superior. The problem is that you have not gotten to that point yet and have certainly not seen the benefit yet. If you can do a network install then I recommend that you go with either woody or sid and use the iso image I pointed to above. > The documentation says you can use a boot floppy to install but > neglects to mention what image to use... It even goes so far as to > demonstrate the dd and rawrite commands.... but gives only "image" > as the image name in the examples.. This is a bug in the > documentation. I agree. And another point of confusion. At one time the boot floppies were always floppies. But now today they also mean cd images as well as floppy images. So for cd images you have to look at floppy images. Confusing. It is legacy. And the real section of the debian web site that talks about boot floppies only has floppy sized images. > I've tried the rescue.bin and root.bin--the rescue just boots my previously > installed Potato and the other doesn't boot anything. You are walking the same path I walked. The root.bin is a component of the rescue.bin image. You don't need it yourself at this point. It is useful if you wanted to modify the rescue.bin image. You don't, so just ignore that one for now. The rescue.bin image should be okay for you. But it might not be an installation image. I have found that the compact image seems to work for me while the other one does not work at all for me. Also, those are potato images. If you go that route you will end up with an old potato system and will still need to update to woody. > So I have to ask, does an installation floppy image even exist? (Or does the > documentation lie?) I will second your complaints. http://www.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst The web page here looks like it should answer the question. But it only points off to here. http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-install-methods#s-install-floppies That document just runs in circles. It needs an update. But woody needs to be released before it can really be updated. A catch-22 situation. If at all possible do the network installation mentioned above. Bob
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