best way to install linux to a laptop

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

Certainly with some distributions, more than the kernel have been modified
to an extent to allow proper installation.  Debian is the one I'm most
familiar with and I know some other things have been modified in the
install routein to allow it to install in a friendly manner.  So even if
you *could* throw a kernel into a CD image and get it back on to CD, it's
not a recommended way of going about it.

I didn't understand your query about linuxconf and its dependancies.

In response to another point you made, if you have a network (i.e. 2
machines or more) that you want to share one IP address, you must use IP
masquerading.  Why?  Because.  Here's 2 examples.

Example one: Your gateway machine has the shared IP address and also has a
private address on an internal network (e.g. 10.0.0.1).  Another internal
machine has an internal network address of 10.0.0.2.  Any requests from
this internal machine to the net will almost certainly go unanswered, as
the 10.0.0.2 address is unrouted any further out than your local
network.  If you ask some other router on the network what and where that
address is, it either won't know or may even point you to some other
machine on *it's* network.  Anyway, the result is no worky.

Example two: 2 machines on your network are assigned the same IP
address.  Boy, this is asking for trouble.  Requests to the net will again
go out, but will be returned to your gateway machine and not the internal
one.  And that's assuming it even goes out.  Your gateway machine won't
particularly like your routing table, as it'll have 2 entries for the same
address.  You may get around it by putting in a host entry for that
internal machine, but providing this doesn't confuse it too badly, then no
requests made from your gateway machine will then be received by it, as
it'd probably get shunted off to your internal machine.  Again, no good.

The situation is simple.  If you only have one connection to the net, then
the machines on your network need to have propper routed internet IP
addresses or you need to use IP masquerading.  If you have a mixture of the
two, you will still need to run IP masquerading *IF* you want the
machine(s) with private addresses to access the net.  Probably the only
exception to this is where an internal machine is providing a service
accessable from the outside that the gateway machine does not.  In this
case, you'd set up the gateway machine to forward all these requests to the
internal machine.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoff Shang <gshang10 at scu.edu.au>
ICQ number 43634701