Greetings Debians! You might find my problem too simple, but even after using Linux for some tiny three years, I could not get a custom Debian boot CD to run the way it was intended...perhaps cos my brain was emptied by using SuSE Linux the past :-)
Okay, here the prob: I want to settle over to Debian due to security and clearity issues (means those desktop-oriented dists like SuSE are getting to untidy). Yet, I do not indend to buy a Deb CD set so far; thus i decided to test install a basic Debian on my tiny server. This machine does not own a floppy drive but a CD-ROM only. So I wanted to create a selfmade mini-Debian of about 50 megs of space. Via ftp I downloaded these files from the Potato release (Woody comes later...): //from the udma66 tree: -base2.2.tgz -drivers.tgz -linux -rescue.bin (1.44) -root.bin (1.44) Well, when doing a install from scratch using floppy disks, there is no question how to install Debian, but when using a CD???... Naively, I started to make an ISO img including the expanded dirtree contained in the base2.2 tarball and added the kernel to /boot. In order to make a bootabel CD, I told mkisofs to use rescue.bin as boot image. But - not wondering - it booted like from floppy querying the root.bin. Uhoh! How to get it right? Means, a boot CD that starts and runs the "Debian menu" (do not know the official name - you know that initial "ASCII menu"). I have spent two complete days in searching diff. newsgroups, webpages and of course the (besides that small leak) install instructions included in the ftp dirs. Additinally, I "lost" some CDs while trying around. Any help is appreciated; thanx in advance, seeya, Timo Boewing
