debian network installation

[Koinonia]

I am planning on testing this out over the weekend, so I will need just a small bit of information.

I was wondering whether anyone had installed Debian via network by booting from floppy disks. I looked in the Debian ftp site to see the floppy images, but there are many. Does anyone know which one is immediately required? How many disks would i need?

I have installed red hat, freeBSD (via network as well)... and although i am in no means an expert in either distribution, I would like to give debian a try to see some differences.

Thanks in advance.

 

[SUOrangeman]

I performed a network install of Debian last month. It took a few times, but I finally got it. (I've been using Mandrake since 7.1 days, I believe).

The main thing I noted about the install floppies were the feature sets I wanted. For instance, I knew that I wanted ext3 and a 2.4 kernel. It just so happened that the Woody ext3-supporting boot floppy also supported ATA-100. I ended up using the ext3-udma100 floppy. If you read through the types of floppies that are available, you can narrow down which floppy images you'll need.

Also, pay particular attention to the directory structure of the FTP site. At times, the Debian install will expect some of those files to be in the same structure. Since I was trying install onto a bare hard drive, I had some fun trying to mimick the directory structure of the FTP site, just so the darn thing would install. It took a few tries ... and I did not take notes ... but everything eventually started working.

-SUO