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Re: [LUG] Interesting situation...

 

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007 09:44:28 +0100 (BST)
"Neil Stone" <neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> A guy at work has come to me with an interesting situation...
>
> He has a laptop on which he would like GNU/Linux installed (he wants
> SuSe, but i'm trying to avoid RPM based if I can)
>
> Problem, the CD drive is knackered... the machine can't boot from
> USB....

I thought debootstrap was meant for this situation - download a bare
Debian installation across a network connection and boot from that.

If you can share a directory on the machine across a network with samba,
you can copy a Debian system onto it:

debootstrap etch /mnt/root http://ftp.uk.debian.org

Not sure how to sort this out with reference to filesystems but if you
can connect to the laptop (telnet if necessary, or putty if you can
download it whilst the laptop is still running MS), that could help.
You might need PartitionMagic or similar to create space that can be
made into ext2.

This is all theoretical though - haven't done it myself. If you fancy
having a go at this, let me know. I'd love to do this for real! I would
expect that the architecture of the host Debian system should match the
architecture of the laptop so two i386 systems would be best.

Once it boots, the problem is solved.

Certainly, debootstrap is used for setting up embedded devices - it
should work with a desktop unit.

http://wiki.debian.org/EmDebian/CrossDebootstrap

http://wiki.debian.org/EmDebian/DeBootstrap

--

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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