Minimal system installation (was: What version)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 16:01:57 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote:
> On  Monday, December 27, 2004 3:08 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>> On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote:
>>> A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram.  It
>>> only has a floppy drive.  What version of FreeBSD do you recommend
>>> and would you send me the link to download it.
>>
>> It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend
>> to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a
>> diskless workstation.  FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*.  If this is
>> all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it.
>
> I have a 750 mb hardrive on it.  

Ah.  You said you only had a floppy.

> Is this big enough?

Yes, you can do something useful with that.

> I can put another drive if necessary.  I think I have a 4 gb on the
> shelf.

You can certainly fill that too :-)

So your question is how to install the software?  Your best bet would
be to put the disk in a machine with a CD-ROM and install it there.
You can then move the disk back to the target machine.  Make sure that
the disk is connected the same way in both machines (preferably
primary master).

If you can't do that, and you can't install a CD-ROM drive
temporarily, you'll have to follow the instructions in the handbook
for floppy installations.  It's certainly faster to move disks or
CD-ROM drives.

Greg
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