[Gllug] Linux installation conundrum

[Grzegorz Jaskiewicz]

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On Sunday 08 of June 2003 15:18, Richard Jones wrote:
> Situation: very old laptop which lacks (working) floppy or a CD drive
> of any sort. However it's running an ancient copy of Red Hat (4.2 or
> 5.2 or something!) with a 2.2.17 kernel.
>
> It has working PCMCIA, and I have CF cards, network cards, etc. all
> working fine.
>
> I'd very much like to get Debian onto this machine. My problem is
> booting the initial kernel. Given that I can copy any required files
> onto the laptop either over the network or on CF cards, is it at all
> possible to get the Debian installer booted on this system? I'm
> thinking some sort of "boot Linux within Linux" option.
>
> It would be nice if I could copy the rescue, root and driverNN
> floppies to the HD and have it (somehow) boot and run them all.
>
> Or is there some other way to get Debian onto this machine?

Setup new partition (if there is any space on HD), if not you have to tidy up 
HD and leave some space. Or you even can take HD out and just setup linux on 
any computer and put HD back.

What i am doing for servers is - i am preparing clean instalation of debian, 
with all changes made by my self (clean ups, new kernel and so on) and i am 
keeping this in cpio.bz2 format. Whenever i need to setup new server, i need 
just to make partitions on new HD. cpio -i <image.cpio , boot with knoppix 
(to setup lilo, fstab and others) and reboot. .. we have new server.
You can do the same thing with your laptop.  Lets say that you have your 
redhat on hda1,hda2,and hda3 is swap partition. 
You can add hda4 as root partition of debian, i am sure that hda1 is /boot 
partition - you can put 2.4.20 kernel there. use root=/dev/hda(debian 
partition) as an option for this kernel and you can have dual boot 
redhat/debian. 
Then you can wipe out redhat instalation from debian and set debian only.

I don't know if my explanation is clear enougth. Still a best solution is just 
to take HD out and setup new system on other computer.
Considering fact that old means slow, you will setup your system even faster 
on different machine :=))

- --
Grzegorz Jaskiewicz
K4 Labs
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