[conspire] my old acer laptop

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Heather Stern (star at starshine.org):

> Well, at only 2 or 3 a debian setup can get onto the net
> (e.g. via pcmcia network) - if you don't mind a slightly
> large stack it can install Base completely from floppy.

I thought it was conceivable that his laptop might not have PCMCIA 
sockets (though I don't remember seeing such a machine since the 486).
But, Dan, definitely you want to leverage that PCMCIA capability as much
as possible, if the laptop has any.

The consistent theme you should be noting here is that there are
_plenty_ of ways to install Linux other than directly from a CD-ROM
drive.

> 'Course I usually brazenly take the drive out, mount it
> elsewhere, fill 'er up.   DOesn't mean you might not still
> be looking for a tight fit - 328 MB, 512 MB anyone ? :)

...And I meant to tell Dan about that option, too.  Dan, many (not all)
laptops are relatively painless to temporarily extract the hard drive
from.  They're built that way for ease of service.  With the drive out
of the case, you can temporarily hang it off a desktop machine's IDE
chain, install Linux onto it there, and put it back into the laptop box.

My recollection is that the only thing you then have to repair, in the
Linux installation, is its LILO or GRUB setup, which you can do using a
maintenance floppy.

> Heh, no problem!  p.s. Debian base comes with this abomination
> called ae.  Run away at full speed.  Install midnight commander
> and use mcedit, plus get a nice ftp client and tarball viewer all 
> in one...

Hmm, I've been meaning to make a list of nice little console editors.
There are quite a few.  But yeah, mcedit does nicely.

Reminds me:  If you want to see a neat trick, check out the lftp
client's support of the FISH protocol (FIles over SHell).  The idea of
FISH has the client side using a type of glue software called an IOSlave
(one for FISH) to remap client requests as shell commands sent over an
ssh tunnel, and then map back the return values.  Several
implementations exist.  The one in lftp uses remote shell commands to 
_completely_ emulate ftp over the SSH session (browsing 'n' all).  All
it takes on the remote end is generic sshd.  No funky sftp stuff required.

There's a widget in KDE3 called kio_slave that can be called by any KDE3
software (such as Konqueror) to do any remote commands required.  Same
idea.

Anyhow, if you want the feature set of ftp with the security of SSH, 
try lftp.

-- 
Cheers,                                      "My file system's got no nodes!"
Rick Moen                                    "How does it shell?"
rick at linuxmafia.com