I need a floppy disk!?

OK, exams finished on Thursday…I let myself recoup on Friday and today I decided have a play with my spare tower…Up until recently I have had OpenSuse 10.2 on there running GNOME (the CPU is an old AMD Athlon and it has an ancient GPU and goodness knows how much RAM).

Anyway, I decided to look around and decided on reinstalling the tower with Fedora 8 and Debian 4. Fedora asked for a single DVD to install the OS, which was great, I’ve got two DVDs left in my supply and about five CD’s. Fedora is downloading now though uTorrent on Windows (slowly through my internet connection :-( ).

I went to the Debian site and looked at downloaded the DVD, surely it’s only a DVD? Fedora was, Suse was, I’m sure Ubuntu is too…But nope, Debian is three DVDs big! So I looked around the site and found just what I wanted: a network install. All I needed was 1.44MB worth of files that would go and connect to the Debian servers and install the OS for me. I hunted high and low in my room and found that I have no floppy disks…Then, looking in the tower, I realised that I had taken out my floppy drive from the tower…Brilliant stuff eh!?

So, instead I had to download a disk image (all of 44MB I think) and shove it in the machine, it would link to the other images online and install the OS from there! “Great!” I thought, “Simple, may take a while, but only one CD!”, thinking this after looking at the nine or ten CD images Debian asked for…I downloaded this small image, burnt it to a CD and whacked it in the machine, booted it up and tapped ’enter’ when asked to install. I came to a menu, looking down I asked it to detect my network configuration, but it couldn’t work my network card!!! Grrrr, I’m now downloading the three DVD images via BitTorrent :-( I’m not a happy bunny…

Off out for a grump with some friends, and they will be hearing about this you can be sure!