TAPE INSTALLATION ROOTDISK

Here it is - a version of the tty144 disk designed for installing Slackware
from tape. I've tested on my Colorado Jumbo 250, but it should work for most
floppy tape and SCSI tape drives. There's no reason it can't work for QIC-02
as well, but I haven't compiled a QIC-02 capable bootkernel (yet).

Any of the 2.0.0 bootkernel disks will work for floppy tape support. If you're
installing from a SCSI drive, make sure you use a bootkernel with SCSI support.

You need to have a blank MS-DOS formatted disk ready to store the install
scripts and installation defaults. The installation uses two tape passes - one
to read these files from the tape, and the second to do the actual installation.
Once you've written the files from the first tape pass to your floppy, then you
won't need to scan those files again if you install from the same tape in the
future.

The tape must be written in GNU tar format (or a compatible block size with some
other 'tar' - anyone know what that would be?). This is the command that would
write out the tape, assuming you're sitting in a directory set up like 
/pub/linux/slackware on ftp.cdrom.com:

tar cv {a?,ap?,d?,e?,f?,i?,iv?,n?,oop?,t?,tcl?,x?,xap?,xd?,xv?,y?}/*

This insures that the files are written to the tape in the proper order.

You must set your TAPE variable first. I use this in my .profile under BASH:

TAPE=/dev/ftape
export TAPE

Unlike installing from floppy disks, you don't need to install all the *.tgz
files, or even all the directories. The only requirement is that 'base.tgz'
must be the first package (*tgz file) written to the tape.

Good luck, folks! This is pretty experimental still, so let me know how it
works for you and if you have any suggestions for improvements.

---
Patrick Volkerding
volkerdi@ftp.cdrom.com
