Subject: Re: installing - msg#00012

I understand the implied jab - 'if ppl (like me?) would help more,
the project would advance more.'

Unfortunately, I (and I am sure many others in the MF world)
are not linux gurus capable of helping, even if we had the time.

If we want to be able to show that linux is worth *anything*,
we need to be able to get it in and running with minimal
'extra-professional' knowledge. (is there such a word? meaning
'out of my profession'?)

Setting up a full debian mirror (where? how? what is rsync?)
doesn't seem possible to me. OTOH, installing from a CD whose
ISO image I d/l and burn is reasonable. For that all I need is
a local net connection to a PC *inside* the firewall, with an NFS
server. I have done this before, I just don't remember which
distro it was. Sorry.

I also tried once to use FTP as the install method, but Windows
FTP was not able to work with the CD filesystem. (Now that I think
of it, I think it was SuSE).

So, I don't think a "purely CD install for s390" is really what
I am looking for. A s390 doesn't usually (ever??) have its own
CD drive anyway. But NFS is really pretty easy to set up
(I mean from the user standpoint, I understand that it would need
more developer time to add another install method).
I even got a freebie NFS server that worked fine, with easy
instructions and only a few minutes to get running.

I apologize if I sound complaining, I *do* appreciate
all the work that goes into giving away free software!
Unfortunately, as things stand today, I just cannot use it,
and I doubt that I am alone in this. No one here will authorize
expenditure of any of the taxpayer's money for a
commercial linux, and I cannot install the free one. :-(

Thank you,
Shimon

P.S. Do you think my REXX, PL/1, ASM, VM skills would be of any use?

On 22 Apr 2006 at 14:58, Frans Pop wrote:

> On Friday 21 April 2006 13:54, Shimon Lebowitz wrote:
> > I have in the past installed linux on IBM with
> > NFS from a CD, but that seems to be out of style
> > now.... I cannot understand *requiring* an Internet
> > connection EVER, but certainly not for something
> > other than a personal home computer.
>
> You can of course also set up a local mirror on your own network and use
> that: no internet connection required during installation.
>
> The basic reason that there is no purely CD-based installation for S/390
> is that there is just no-one that has done the work to support it.
>
> The S/390 port in Debian is kept alive by a depressingly small number of
> people. If you want to see additional functionality like this, new people
> will need to step in and start helping out.
>
> Cheers,
> FJP
>