> Sure, maybe there's a third and even better way of installing Linux on one
> of these things. I couldn't come up with one. I'd love to hear how you'd
> do it - any tricks are acceptable, even recompiling a special kernel on
> another machine and booting from a BIOS-only floppy. Burning your own
> custom installation CD-ROM with a custom initrd etc is _not_ an acceptable
> solution, I'm afraid.
Nfs install over plip (parallel cabel) works just fine. (It is an
ordinary nfs install when one chooses "plip" for the NIC driver.) I've
installed Linux on several laptops this way at installation parties.
All you need is a hard drive, parallel port, and ability to boot the
kernel. The only problem with this is that the PLIP driver is a real
CPU eater -- during the install the CPU usage crops up to 90-95% on
the nfs server. (Just an aestetic issue really, there are not many
servers with two parallel ports available.)
Theoretically, one can install via a serial null cable using ppp.
Currently this would have to be done by hand -- one needs to include
pppd into the ram disk and manually start it form a virtual console
(or change the installation program to include ppp install option).
There would be no CPU usage issues with this, however the speed would
be 4 times slower (15-16Kbytes/sec as opposed to 60-64Kbytes/sec for
the parallel port).
-- ---------------------------------------- Constantine Gavrilov Unix System Administrator and Programmer Orbotech Yavne 81102, Israel Phone: (972-8)-942-3064 Fax: (972-8)-942-3800 ----------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/