[olug] another distro

[Mark A. Martin]

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
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Mark A. Martin					Dept of Applied Mathematics
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~mmartin	University of Washington
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