I just came across that question (again), localizing in French manual page for makepkg.

In this specific case, the manual advises not to use Bash extensions in an installation script as it could fail in case of installation from a floppy disk (I personally favor POSIX compliant syntax as much as I can anyhow, but that's not the point here).

More generally, does anyone know of a remaining use case for installation from floppy disks?

If not, maybe we could get rid of mentioning floppy disks' usage, as well as code to use them, say in Slackware scripts shipped in Slackware 14.2 or 15?

An interesting poll question would be "What was the most recent Slackware distribution you installed using floppy disks?"

You can't install from floppy disk any more as there are numerous packages that are larger than 1.44MB

I think the only reason the code is still there as removing it would take a lot of care to ensure the scripts aren't broken in the process and there is always more important things to worry about.

Not Slackware, but Debian Potato. Minimal base system installed from a couple of 1.44" BOOT & ROOT floppies on a 486 laptop back in 2001.

Just out of sheer curiosity how many floppy disks would it take for a recent version of slackware to fit on if one would want to install from a floppy disk?

at 1.4 meg ?
more than the 1.5 boxes( 24 count) of unused blank 3.5's that i have and more than the 1/2 box of used disks .For a total of 50 disks

Thanks, I was just curious. I remember the 5 & 1/4 inch disks and like to keep things in perspective.

Roughly 1.000 floppy disks.

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heh... boy would that be a long install... assuming it were even possible.

With my luck disk #357 would be bad.

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Can you even buy a box with a floppy drive?

Would you want to?

Why?

no
but there are still a few new 3.5 in drives sitting on shelf's so you could buy one
The same goes for disks . They are no longer made but there is still some in inventory at a few places .

if you had to move a lot of old data off a LOT of disks , you might .

Errr, I used a Floppy disk to Flash a Bios on a Police Laptop repair. Upgraded it so it could boot off of usb.

rokytnji and John VV, thanks for reminding us that floppy disks still can be used to flash a BIOS, or move data from a computer if that's the only usable media for that purpose.

My initial question remains though: any remaining case of using floppy disks to install Slackware ? (or at least some packages, as kernels nowadays are way too big).

Nobody will be installing a recent version of Slackware on floppies any time soon, but I believe the installer is designed to be able to install any version of Slackware, so the floppy stuff is still in there.