3.1.7 Choice of boot floppies

For Potato, I liked the IDEPCI disk set for normal install to a desktop. For Woody, I like the bf2.4 boot disk set. They both use a version of boot-floppies to create boot floppies.

If you have a PCMCIA network card, you need to use the standard boot disk set (largest number of floppies but all driver modules available) and configure the NIC in the PCMCIA setup; do not try to set up an NIC card in the standard network setup dialog.

For special systems, you may need to create a custom rescue disk. This can be done by replacing the kernel image named "linux" on the Debian rescue disk by overwriting it with another compressed kernel image compiled off-site for the machine. Details are documented in readme.txt on the rescue disk. The rescue floppy uses the MS-DOS filesystem, so you can use any system to read and edit it. This should make life easier for people with a special network card, etc.

For Sarge, debian-installer and/or pgi is expected to be used for creating boot floppies.