I was wondering about source distros like Gentoo, and I wanted to know if you can boot up with floppies and do a network installation/download using a dial-up connection. Thanks.

You can but it would be very, very slow ( Also you could get kicked off by your ISP with the time it would take. ) Where talking days and days.

Well the thing is with Gentoo, is that it gives you the base system and you can download just the few other packeges you want and have them compiled right there. If the base system is already provided by disk, then shouldn't getting the other packages you want NOT take days? The way I understood it, the base system was provided.

Yes, as long as you can connect, you can do a network installation. From a practical standpoint though, you will need to download a few gigs of data, so if you're connected at 56K, realistically the entire process would most likely require several days. Over that long a period of time, the chances that a dial-up connection will drop or be interrupted are pretty high, so although it may be theoretically possible, it probably isn't practical. Perhaps the better question is: Would you be able to devote 4 or 5 consecutive days to the process? Just for comparison, I downloaded Suse and then installed it using a DSL connection, and that too, pretty much the entire weekend. In Suse's case, I needed to download approx 3.3G of data, and I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with that on a dial-up. Just my 2 cents. -- J.W.

Read my post above.

What J.W. said is valid, the base system isn't that much. If you want X working thats a lot of stuff.

Yeah - and maybe you should read the timestamps of my post and your post. Sorry I didn't happen to sense somehow that you posted a reply while I was in the middle of typing. Sheesh! -- J.W.

Exactly how big is the X windowing system?

Theres a lot of parts check gentoos site. Theres 590 ebuilds just for X. Some you won't need, some are diffrent types of the same thing ( you only really need one DE/WM), but to get something useful where still talking a lot. Before you even install a program to run.

Holy crap, so is it even worthwhile to do a network install? Does anyone bother?

Well as I said you don't need them all. On my broadband ( 1Mb ) It took Debian about four hours to install. Times 20 gives you 80 hours of installing, if you compile as well, you can easily double or triple that. Though I did install all of KDE, which is quite big. So I'd reckon on at least 4 days.

Thats if you don't loose connection, and don't have to re-download anything if it get corrupted.

Check http://www.linuxiso.org/ for CD's

Yeah, I suppose you're right.