I know we're mostly all grizzled young been-ther-done-that Linux folk, but I recently had cause to go 'Oh! Cool!' when setting up Debian on a little Unisys P166 with no optical drive.

What can I say, but, doing a boot-floppies-then-net install is (a) Easy and (b) Clever! I know it's not particularly special or amazing, but I'm still really impressed by the whole 'It Just Works' aspect of it, and of course the fact that so many people actually care enough about what they're doing, to ensure said 'It Just Works' is a reality.

There were only two challeneges during the install.

First - finding 6 x 1.44Mb disks. I've almost completely rid my house of them. (same with floppy drives)

Second - discovering the I/O addr and IRQ of the machine's built-in NE2000. I don't know if this applies to all machines, but here's a tip: Try and get it to boot off the network, and it will happily report the IRQ and I/O setting it's using to try and connect.

After that, the install carried on apace. Well, as fast as a P166 with 16MB RAM can carry on, anyway.

Nearly ran out of disk space (only have a half-gig drive), but then remembered apt-get clean, and all was good.

So the happy ending is I now have a little Squid machine that I can also use to dabble with Postgres/PHP. And it's about the size (height notwithstanding) of an A4 page, so it can keep out of the way and just do its thing. Hurrah.