Do people still use floppy when they install Linux?
 

When I read some books and on-line docs regarding linux installation, I often saw "boot floppy", "rescue floppy disk". Do SA still use floppy to install the OS? Or the books and docs are just too old...

I've never used one... You can, as far as I know, but all distros I've seen are either ~300MB (fitting on a CD) or ~3GB (fitting on a DVD). The only time I've considered using a floppy is when writing a bootloader :)

Rescue media can take all forms, and even today, perhaps floppies are used for some things. I use them myself for BIOS updates only, but there are lots of other uses, and there are tiny Linuxes which will fit on a floppy (as far as I recall) but they are very purpose-oriented distros - certainly not full-featured or "general purpose" by any means.

As for installation - doing so by floppy, or via a boot floppy to start, these days would be relatively rare. Almost any other media or method would be preferable and more common, including netboot, netinstall, USB install, and optical media. I doubt many (or any) modern general purpose Linux offers install via floppy by default, although there are probably still docs included with many, giving instructions for doing so if you wish.

Chances are good, you're looking at old documentation.

Cheers!

A boot floppy is just that, a diskette with just enough to boot the system to a command prompt. Rescue disks are similar, used when the system can not be booted from the hard drive, or some other source, ( CD drive, USB flash drive ) and they have enough utilities to fix system problems.

Are they still used? Yes.

Do you need them? For the most part no.

There are many ways to install linux. Most often it will be from a CD or DVD. You can install from a flash drive, I do this on my netbook. It does not have a CD/DVD drive. Network install also works.

Boot floppies are still useful if you have a system without a working CD drive, or the BIOS does not allow for booting from a CD or DVD drive. This is the case with many older machines. So you use the boot floppy and put the driver for your CD on it, boot, and then install from a CD.

The doc is not too old.

Modern working systems do not need them. They are provided for those odd situations.

You can't put normal kernel to a floppy these days. And the kernel is not everything.

Normal meaning a 2.6 kernel.