[NBLUG/talk] How Low Can We Go?

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 12:21:04PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> Can't you boot from a floppy disk, *then* install from a USB CD-ROM 
> attached to the PCMCIA card?  I don't know if there are any Linux 
> distros where the boot floppies support USB PCMCIA cards *and* USB 
> CD-ROM drives, but at least in theory, it would work.

Debian does.

Go here:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy/
(shortened to: http://xrl.us/kxsy )

Download boot.img, root.img and net-drivers.img.
"dd if=example.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync" to put each image onto a
floppy.  Label the floppies, of course.  Boot from the boot.img and when it
asks about a possible driver disk, put the "net-drivers" disk in; that
includes PCMCIA stuff.

Do a very minimal install and use "apt-get" to install things as they're
needed.  For partitioning you want to go with two or three partitions: swap,
/ and maybe /boot.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit