Tom H wrote:
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 10:48 PM, Paul Condon<pecondon1@gmail.com> wrote:I think I have also read somewhere that netinst is a minimal system that is capable of hardly anything, except downloading and installing more packages from a mirror on the web. For this to be true in any meaningful sense, I had always assumed that it is capable of booting from hard disk. And Tom is finding that his install is not capable of doing that. The sequence of events for a netinst type install is that at some point *before* the CD is popped out, the grub boot program is written to the MBR space on the hard disk. Then after rebooting you are offered the tasksel dialog to specify what you want installed into the final system. OTOH, if you use businesscard, you do your tasksel before popping out the CD, because, I suppose, the businesscard install is not capable of booting from what it has written onto the HD, just as a 'live' disk does not automatically write itself onto the HD. But Tom never said anything about the properties of businesscard, or about using businesscard in his experiments. If I have recalled incorrectly, and the netinstall CD does ask for tasksel selection before popping out the CD, then there is very little observable difference between the two. (Also, not something that Tom expressed an interest in. ) And, perhaps both install systems that are incapable of booting from HD. That is very minimal, indeed.I'm not the one experimenting, it's the OP.
Yes ;)Some of my questions MIGHT appear to make more sense if I were a modern Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep when Zilog introduced the high speed Z80A - for the younger set, a souped up 8080 operating at 2 MHz. Being in a Microsoft dominated work environment, I was a _user_ of various Windows flavors from 3.1 to XP. I've retired and am rejoining the real world and attempting to bring my competency up to what it was when I used CPM-80.
You can install either a base system or base+standard system from a netinst.iso without an internet connection and they'll both boot up from the HD onto which you're installing. You do get the tasksel menu when you use netinst.iso at the same stage as with other installer sizes before grub's installed not after a reboot. If you have internet access, you have the same tasks available as other installer sizes. AFAIR this is all with the expert install; with the regular install, you have to have an internet connection (the last time that I tried this was when Squeeze was "testing", so I might be misremembering or that requirement might have been dropped). I brought up the businesscard.iso in an earlier email in another thread (AFAIR, with the same OP) to show the difference between it and the netinst.iso.
Probably correct. Somebody did bring it up in one of the threads I started.