No. You can easily have an internet connection without having an OS. Once I was at a customer, who said he had Linux CD's, they were unreadable. So instead, I put in a diskette in the server and booted the computer on that diskette. When asked about the installation method (http, ftp or nfs), I chose ftp, and specified the sunsite.auc.dk address for download of Linux. Then it retrieved the rest of the installation program via ftp, and we installed the server this way.
They had a 1Mbps internet connection, so it took some time to install the server (I think 1-1.5 hour or so), but we had some other tasks to do, so it didn't matter that much.
The fun is, that the installation diskette we booted on, was not made for that version of Linux that we installed. But it worked, and we did not involve any computer with an OS on.
Once I had an IBM Thinkpad laptop on which I wanted to install Linux. First it seemed quite hard, because:
1) I didn't have another computer or network where I was.
2) I had a CD but the laptop couldn't boot on a CD.
3) I had a boot diskette, but the diskette drive and the CD drive could not be in the same laptop at the same time.
So what to do? Simple:
1) Insert the diskette drive and the diskette and turn it on.
2) When the Linux kernel has been read in, it decompresses in memory. At that time, I lifted the keyboard, and the laptop entered sleep mode.
3) I pulled out the diskette drive and inserted the CD-ROM drive.
4) I closed the keyboard lid and resumed the laptop.
5) After decompressing the Linux kernel, the Linux kernel booted and correctly detected the CD-ROM drive.
6) The rest of the installation process was made from the CD-ROM drive, and the diskette drive wasn't necessary any more.
I was quite amazed that it worked. I wonder how they would expect someone to install Windows on that laptop. |
