Subject: new boot floppies

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 10:10 PDT

New boot floppies are available in
ftp://ftp.i-connect.net/debian/unstable/disks-i386/1996_6_2 .
These will no doubt get to the mirror sites later today.
Module configuration has been improved and dselect's FTP method might
work once the base system has been installed (my test system didn't have
a network, so I'm not sure about that). If you can, please perform a
test installation witht these floppies.

There is a new kernel in boot1440.bin, an old one in boot1200.bin
(because the modules in newer kernels run a 1200K floppy out of space).
I am going to have to split up the modules into two floppies, where the
second one is only infrequently-needed ones, so that I can get newer
kernels to work on _any_ size floppy. The latest kernel + modules.tgz
even overflows a 1440K floppy.

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens
--
Pixar's Toy Story: Over 1/3 Billion dollars world box office so far.

Bruce Perens AB6YM          [email-masked]            http://www.hams.com/

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From: Bill Wohler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jun 1996 15:19:46 -0700

Bruce Perens <[email-masked]> writes:
>  dselect's FTP method

  Does this imply that dftp (or the functionality thereof) has been
  merged into dselect?  That would be good.

Bill Wohler <[email-masked]>   ph: +1-415-854-1857  fax: +1-415-854-3195
Say it with MIME.  Maintainer of comp.mail.mh and news.software.nn FAQs.
If you're passed on the right, you're in the wrong lane.

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From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 16:05 PDT

> merged into dselect?  That would be good.

There is an experimental package called dpkg-ftp which provides "dselect"
with another "installation method" called "ftp". When you install this,
you can select the "ftp" installation method in the installation methods
menu, and then "dselect" will get the Packages file and all requested
packages via FTP instead of requiring you to move them by yourself.

This is really cool when it works correctly, but so far it's been less
Than robust. That's what we are working on now.

Another thing we're going to try is to provide the "installation root"
and the base floppies in a publicly-readable NFS partition accessable
via Internet. If you have a system on a LAN that has access to
Internet, this will allow you to install Debian with exactly _one_
floppy, the boot floppy, because the root floppy will be mounted via
NFS, the base floppies and kernel will be on that same NFS filesystem,
and the dpkg-ftp method will work to get the rest of the system.

	Thanks

	Bruce

---

From: "Brian C. White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Jun 1996 01:09:52 -0400

>   merged into dselect?  That would be good.

No.  'dpkg-ftp' is a method for dselect to read from an FTP site in much
the same way that it would read from an NFS mount or CD-ROM.

This seems only fair since 'dftp' has added the ability to run from NFS
mount and CD-ROM.  :-)  [ check out the "--pkgpath" option ]

                                        Brian
                               ( [email-masked] )

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