On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 06:16:30PM -0400, alex wrote: > Does anyone still install Debian using nothing but floppies? Guess how I do all my base installations (hint: all but 1 machine cannot access network (no nics), I cannot get the CD drives recognised (much less bootable, my systems are all ~7-15 years old), and I don't have good serial or parallel cables (or the resources to get replacements for them)) It isn't too bad if you have another system standing by to redo bad floppy images, but in the case of dovetail (one of my systems, ~12 years old), I realised that not all floppy drives and controllers are equal. (that system really caused problems, it has problems reading good floppies... the only floppy that it had no problem with was my fat(ter) floppy (see http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2002/debian-user-200205/msg01212.html for why I don't like that floppy)) Really, the largest problem that I had was with floppying over large (>1.4 meg) packages after the base install. Think of how many floppies that would be needed to floppy over the complete kernel source (for a 2.4 kernel), and remember that it has been done before. (and don't ask me what I was thinking when I decided floppy over the source because flipping those disks (all unlabelled, of course) between systems made me forget ;-) -- Seneca seneca-cunningham@rogers.com
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