Floppy install

Clueless · Guest

Howdy all, I am a Linux noob wanting to try out Gn2. My problem is that my notebook has no CD drive (it's a Thinkpad 240x mininotebook). It has a floppy and I do have network access to my Windows-based desktop systems. I have the Gn2 packages right now on my notebook, in a FAT32 partition. My question is, how do I get them onto the ext3 formatted partition that I created, and get it working? I do have boot & root flops from another Linux distro that I can use to partition the HD. Right now, the boot manager is Lilo (again from another distro), is this OK for use, and if not, how do I switch to GRUB? Thanks in advance for your help.

--H.P.

delta407 · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 6:40 am Post subject:

All Gentoo needs to install is network support, tar + bunzip2, and a filesystem you can install it on. Once you get your box booted off a floppy, partitioned, mounted, and networked, just suck down your stage-? tarball, unpack, and continue with the install as normal.

Oh, and may the Force be with you; floppies are really freakin' small compared to all the stuff you need.

(Remember, the Gentoo installer ramdisk is 23 MB decompressed.)
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Clueless · Guest

Thanks for the quick response. Follow-ups if you don't mind.

My problem is that I still don't know enough about Linux to do networking. I have TCP/IP & SPX/IPX installed on my Windows desktop, with NetBIOS enabled for IPX and disabled for TCP/IP (for security reasons). The reason I want to try Gentoo is that the distro I'm trialing (Slackware) is a bit too obfuscated for me. Thus, I'm trying to avoid NFS installs altogether by find a way for the floppy boot/root combo to see my FAT32 partition, as then I can copy the Gn2 tarballs onto an empty partition. Anyway, I can figure this out by myself...I think.

Question: I have 192 megs of RAM in this notebook. I understand that a swap partition is no longer required. Would it be advisable to not have a swap? What kind of instances would I run into that can exhaust the memory I have?

Thanks as always.

--H.P.

ebichu · Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 12:37 pm Post subject: Re: Follow-up questions