[ale] Slackware to CD

[Bob Dallis]

"Gary S. MacKay" wrote:

> Well, hind site is always 20/20 they say. I've just downloaded the entire
> Slackware-4.0 directory. Yes, all 900+ megs of it on a 56k modem. (It took
> almost 5 days!) I wanted to abort it but as it keep going, it became a
> challenge to see how far it would go!
>
>         Anyway, I went to burn a CD so I can install it, and realized that
> the Adaptec Ez-cd software will burn an ISO9660 disc, but only with 8.3
> filenames. If I set it to Joliet, it will use the long filenames, but I
> doubt that Linux will read it right at install time. Now what do I do?
>
> I'm going to try to mount it via NFS so I can finish the install, but I
> would like to get this onto a CD somehow. Any ideas?
>
> - Gary
>
> -------------------------------
> Edison Information Technologies
> P.O. Box 554
> Milan, OH  44846-0554
> 419.499.7040
> www.EdisonInfo.com
> Gary at EdisonInfo.com
> -------------------------------

The Linux-Mandrake site has instructions for downloading and burning a CD
from their development and beta distributions.  The downloading instructions
ensure that you get all of the symbolic links as well as the actual files you
need.

I really liked using wget to retrieve the packages, because it preserved the
links and only gets the packages that have been updated.  The bad news was
that while wget retrieves the current package, it doesn't remove the package
being replaced.  In any event wget will build your links for you, if that is
an issue, using the following command:

  wget -rm ftp://ftp...........com/pub/debian-directory

The files will end up in ftp...........com/pub/debian-directory on your
system relative to the directory from which you issue the command.  So.. If
you know the directory structure of the ftp site, you can create the same
structure on your system and move the 900+ MB to that structure.  Then the
wget command will rebuild you links, but will not download the files that you
have already retrieved.

Making the CD is relatively painless using Linux tools.  The Mandrake
instructions for burning a bootable CD of their Cooker development tree are
as follow:

  mkisofs -R -b images/boot.img -c images/boot.cat -o cooker.iso cooker

  cdrecord -eject -v speed=4 dev=4,0 cooker.iso

        (dev=4,0 can be determined with cdrecord -scanbus)

The first instruction creates the image, and the second one burns it.  A CD
created using these instructions should work just fine with Linux.  Also,  I
believe you can use Adapetc EasyCD to burn the image created with the mkisofs
command, but I haven't tested that theory.