Masa's Journal: Real Men do it by hand

Damn, it can sometimes be hard to install Linux. Or any other operating system.

These days, everybody seems to assume that a CD-ROM drive is in every possible machine on the earth. That damned Compaq, I mentioned yesterday, doesn't happen to have one and I have to try to install Linux by hand to it. So far, I have tried to install Slackware 8.1, NetBSD 1.6.0, OpenBSD 3.2 and even AtheOS, but without any success. Actually, OpenBSD was the only one, which I was able to install and configure using just one floppy disk.

Installation of the OpenBSD is one of the smoothest things, I have seen in the non-Microsoft world. But I wasn't able to set up X11 correctly, so back to square one.

Now, I'm installing a Slackware 7.1 using a floppy disk and a network connection. Well, I had to modify the installation process quite heavily, because Slackware doesn't support installation over FTP and I'm not yet fetched all the installation packages, but all in all, everything seems to be working fine.

After booting the Slackware installation, I had to extract and copy dhclient and all relevant accessories and wget to get started with the process. And I had to modify dhclient script to get Internet connection working. Thank god, wget is so smart that it can fetch files recursively. Now I'm just waiting that downloading finishes up.

Installing Slackware 7.1 to this old piece of shi^W joy is possible. Thanks to the wonders of modern Internet, I was able to find proof about it. The page also provides a ready-made XF86Config file for my laptop.