[lug] Installation Guidance Needed

[D. Stimits]

...

>
> Very few OSes will start their install from under another OS.  (Well, I
> guess not that few.  NetWare, Armed Linux, BeOS . . .)  What you need is
> an install boot floppy that goes with your install media.  Typically there
> is a disk image and a (DOS/Windows) utility for making a disk from that
> image on the CD.  (BTW, in *NIX the tool you need for this task is built
> in, it is called "dd."  Don't run it as root until you get your feet under
> you ;-)

One additional note on this part: If you have a windows machine running, 
the command which copies images to a floppy is rawwrite.exe (or is it 
spelled rawrite?). You'll find that there are floppy images with any 
install disks, and that they are exactly sized to fit a 1.44 MB floppy 
in most cases (I say most because there are floppies of other sizes 
useable in odd cases). CD drives old enough to be from the 486 days had 
proprietary interfaces, and did not use a common IDE cable...plus the 
BIOS did not understand bootable CD's, so you have two strikes against 
CD boot on such a machine. If you were to get a newer CD drive for 
cheap, it would be useful, but there is a very strong chance it wouldn't 
work anyway (the BIOS issue again).

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi DOT com

PS: My first linux was on a 486 with slackware, but slackware is not 
considered "easy" to use in relation to some of the distributions. It 
was mentioned that Mandrake can't work with a 486.