[olug] another distro

mesc mescie at home.com
Fri Oct 27 14:22:27 UTC 2000


I'm sorry I should have been clearer.I don't have a cd of another
distribution,I was looking to download the image of another distro to install
and try to see how I like it over what I'm using now but what's confusing me is
what image I would download to do the install,and the fact that  one
distribution I read calls for a rescue floppy to start the install (debian) and
another distro calls for a boot.img (mandrake),I believe it's called a
supplemental image.

            Gary Martin

"Mark A. Martin" wrote:

> With many distributions, you don't need to make a boot floppy to start
> the installation if you have the distribution on a CD and you can set up
> your BIOS to allow booting from the CD.  Of course, you'll need to make
> a boot floppy if you're going to install from a partition on your hard
> drive.  Also, if you're going to install from your hard drive, you'll
> want to download the entire directory tree for whatever version you're
> going to install from an FTP site.
>
> Making a boot floppy is essentially a matter of dd'ing a boot image from
> the distribution to a floppy.  For Mandrake and Red Hat, the images are
> located in the images directory on the CD or in the images subdirectory
> of a directory on the FTP site containing a version of the
> distribution.  Aside from the boot image that you would use to install
> from a hard drive (hd.img) and the image that you'd use to install from
> a CD (cd.img), there are special images, such as one that you would use
> to install from a PCMCIA device (pcmcia.img) and one that you would use
> to install from a network (network.img).  By the way, since you have a
> fast network connection, why not install from the network rather than
> downloading first?  (For the curious, network installs should not be
> attempted over a modem.)
>
> The boot disk that you use to perform an installation is typically not a
> rescue disk.  For some distributions the boot floppy can serve as a
> rescue disk.  But most distributions now recommend that you use a boot
> disk specifically created as a rescue disk for that purpose.  For Red
> Hat and Mandrake, the rescue image resides in the images directory and
> is called rescue.img.  The reason for having a separate rescue disk is
> that floppies don't hold much, the tools you need in a rescue situation
> differ from the tools that a modern distribution needs for installation,
> and both sets of tools won't fit on a single floppy.
>
> I hope that this clears up some of your confusion.
>
> Mark
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mark A. Martin                                  Dept of Applied Mathematics
> http://www.amath.washington.edu/~mmartin        University of Washington
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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