> having the how-to in the mail archive would certainly help future users in

> Besides, there might stuff that can be made to improve sysinst and/or
> the floppies to make such an install easier.

Ok. An how-to is coming up.
Until then a short notice for them interested/capable to squash bugs.

I have said that there is one bug and one design flaw in the floppy install.

The bug:
When you start, install asks you to put in a diskette "X.aa" and then "X.ab"
and so on. But it never stops asking for higher filenumbers. The menu to
choose from just have two alternatives 1) "read next disk" or 2) "abort
installation". So the procedure doesnt discover that file "X" is complete
and there is no way to tell it that it is done.

The design flaw:
This is a longshot i admitt. Consider it an suggestion for optimization :)
"base.tgz" is 19MB and uncompressed it expands to 45MB. The install
collects all the "split-files" on the target disk and then start
decompression/unpacking, 19+45=64 which is bigger than the whole disk on this
tiny system. One can put it all in one pipe and avoid the intermediate
storage: "cat X.a* | gunzip -c | tar xf -" does the trick.

Here is the script that i wrote to take care of that, spiced with diskette
handling:

while : ;do
  a=`let $a+1`
  read -p "Disk $a: " n > /dev/null 1>&2
  if test "X-$n" != "X-" ;then
    echo "Bye bye..." > /dev/null 1>&2
    exit
  fi
  echo -n "Working ... " > /dev/null 1>&2
  mount -t msdos /dev/fd0a /mnt2
  cat /mnt2/*
  umount /mnt2
  echo  "done" > /dev/null 1>&2
done |gunzip -c |tar xf -

Thats it. Same procedure with etc and kernel and then run MAKEDEV, reboot
and there it is. Do that with XP :)
//Mats