On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:

...

I enjoyed my first go at installing woody on laptop with no cdrom drive yesterday :-) The floor was littered with hurled floppies by the time I went to bed.

Then wbh replied:

Hey - someone else running the same old clunker as me! From what I remember (last install was August last year) I used TomsRTBT to get as far as networking, then sucked debootstrap over (I think you need a sane version of wget, too) Then normal Debian. Seems to be an OK machine but never got the IRDA going, there's a 2.2 driver for those with serious amounts of spare time ;-) TomsRTBT has got me out of a few holes before now...

For the record: had another go at this last night, with success this time. Should anyone else wish to try it, my difficulty was coming at the configuring pcmcia stage. After mounting the root filesystem onto the hard drive, I then ran the "configure pcmcia" stage, edited my pcmcia card and driver required into the pcmcia config file using the minimal console on tty2. Then I ran the "configure the network" stage. Although the pcmcia card was configured, it couldn't be activated, so at this stage I went back to tty2 and did a bit of fettling there... I had to create an empty file called "pcmcia-scheme" in /var/lib/misc or some suchplace, as it was grumbling about that. ifconfig showed no eth0 and none of my usual eth0-persuading runes would work, but I eventually found I needed "ifconfig start eth0 192.168.1.111". I could then go back to the installing procedure on the first terminal and install the base system over a network link. :-)

I tried downloading TomsRTBT, by the way - thanks for the pointer. Alas, though, when I got to 99% I was told my floppy was full.

Now to find out what performance I'll get with a desktop on the machine - it is a present for my dad, he's 73 and has never used a computer, so i thought, well why start with anything other than debian :-)

Jenny