Ability to install from FLOPPIES!

nexus7 · Guest

I think you have done some great work so far, and i would really like to try it out. But you also should consider that free/opensource OSs are often installed not only on new state of the art
systems, but on older systems which for example can't boot from cd-rom. As long as Gentoo hasn't the ability to be installed in a really universal way on various hardware like for example
Debian GNU/Linux or the *BSDs, i think it lacks an important feature. Pointing to tomsrtbt, or
some unofficial debianbootdisks won't do, that's too much fuss, the installprocess should be selfcontained in the distribution i want to install and not having to mess around with kludges. :!:

Don't get me wrong, i think Gentoo is one of the most promising and even delivering Distros
that is out there so far :wink:

klieber · Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2002 7:09 pm Post subject:

I think linux's ability to run on older hardware is both a blessing and a curse.

Currently, there are a ton of linux distros out there, but most refuse to let go of the idea that they have to run on older processors. Debian is a prime example of this. All the packages are built for the 386.

I don't think that Gentoo needs to be everything to all users. I especially don't think that Gentoo needs to support everything back to a 386 processor.

I would rather see developer cycles going towards making Gentoo, in its current form, as bullet-proof as possible, rather than see them focus time and energy on supporting what I consider to be "dead" technologies. There are other distros out there that support those.

Of course, the beauty of open source is, if you believe strongly enough in something, you're able to roll your own solution. If you were to build a floppy install process, I don't think the Gentoo developers would turn their back on it.

My $.02.

--kurt
_________________
The problem with political jokes is that they get elected

Jeevz · Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2002 7:51 pm Post subject:

I agree with klieber.

Although, I certainly wouldn't complain if I could install Gentoo via floppy. :wink:

rizzo · Posted: Thu May 02, 2002 1:53 pm Post subject: Looks like it is possible ...

Have you tried this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/altinstall.html

Seems you can install from floppies. I'm going to try it out when I can, possibly this weekend

febisfebi · Posted: Fri May 03, 2002 3:49 am Post subject:

you could install it from just about any floppy linux distro, just you need the stage1-ix86-1.1a.tbz2, or other ones, and just install it as you would from the cd

rlyacht · Apprentice Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 170

Some people who need to install on a CD-less machine don't have a local http server to put files on. It would be nice for them if they could

1. Download a boot disk that contains grub, fdisk, mount, wget (and of course basic networking stuff), tar, bunzip2
2. There is no step 2
3. Do the usual creating and mounting of /mnt/gentoo , /mnt/gentoo/boot
4. Use wget to get kernel, rescue.gz, and a stage1 .tar.bz2 from gentoo.org, placing them in /boot
5. Set up grub to boot the kernel
6. reboot
7. Do the chroot, unpack the .tar.bz2 into /mnt/gentoo, then delete the .tar.bz2
8. proceed as usual

So we'd need the boot disk, and we'd need to have the files availble for download on gentoo.org, rather than in a .iso.