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- TAPE INSTALLATION ROOTDISK
-
- Here it is - a version of the tty144 disk designed for installing Slackware
- from tape. I've tested on my Colorado Jumbo 250, but it should work for most
- floppy tape and SCSI tape drives. There's no reason it can't work for QIC-02
- as well, but I haven't compiled a QIC-02 capable bootkernel (yet).
-
- Any of the 2.0.0 bootkernel disks will work for floppy tape support. If you're
- installing from a SCSI drive, make sure you use a bootkernel with SCSI support.
-
- You need to have a blank MS-DOS formatted disk ready to store the install
- scripts and installation defaults. The installation uses two tape passes - one
- to read these files from the tape, and the second to do the actual installation.
- Once you've written the files from the first tape pass to your floppy, then you
- won't need to scan those files again if you install from the same tape in the
- future.
-
- The tape must be written in GNU tar format (or a compatible block size with some
- other 'tar' - anyone know what that would be?). This is the command that would
- write out the tape, assuming you're sitting in a directory set up like
- /pub/linux/slackware on ftp.cdrom.com:
-
- tar cv {a?,ap?,d?,e?,f?,i?,iv?,n?,oop?,t?,tcl?,x?,xap?,xd?,xv?,y?}/*
-
- This insures that the files are written to the tape in the proper order.
-
- You must set your TAPE variable first. I use this in my .profile under BASH:
-
- TAPE=/dev/ftape
- export TAPE
-
- Unlike installing from floppy disks, you don't need to install all the *.tgz
- files, or even all the directories. The only requirement is that 'base.tgz'
- must be the first package (*tgz file) written to the tape.
-
- Good luck, folks! This is pretty experimental still, so let me know how it
- works for you and if you have any suggestions for improvements.
-
- ---
- Patrick Volkerding
- volkerdi@ftp.cdrom.com
-