> ... just install Arch Linux to a working desktop ...
How do you do that when you have:
> ... a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has ... bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.
> There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope.
That wasn't clear to me, but in the light of your comment, I see that it's plausible. Thank you.
It always throws me when someone suggests an exercise, and someone, in reply, says, "Or instead, do this other thing."
I'm oddly reminded of when we were recruiting and asked people to write some code to solve a specific task and bring it to the interview for discussion. Someone said "This spec is obvious nonsense" and proceeded to write a completely different spec, implement that, and get it horribly wrong.
> ... just install Arch Linux to a working desktop ...
How do you do that when you have:
> ... a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has ... bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.
> There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope.
So, how do you install Arch Linux?