Ok, I had this crazy item on my wishlist for awhile, and finally figured out a solution worthy of crossing it off my list.

If you have a floppy disk, a floppy drive, a network card and network connectivity (perhaps even dhcp) and are interested in booting a ramdisk environment capable of a fully functional perl within 5 commands or less,take a look at the mini-howto below, also available @ http://compulsion.org/prizes/single_floppy_perl

When writing this hackish howto, I had fanatics and perl instructors teaching students in mind, also people without harddrives or those who feel safer sleeping with a single-floppy perl-capable linux distribition under their pillow.

If you plan to hack this together on a laptop with a network card:
1) wget http://trinux.org/boot/trinux-0.80rc2-pcmcia.img # get the image
2) dd if=trinux-0.80rc2-pcmcia.img of=/dev/fd0 # put it on a floppy

Otherwise you'll probably be hacking something without the need for pcmcia support, so you'll want to get the net image.
1) wget http://trinux.org/boot/trinux-0.80rc2-ide.img # get the image
2) dd if=trinux-0.80rc2-ide.img of=/dev/fd0 # put it on a floppy

Next, boot up the floppy.

When booted (with network support configured, i think it even does dhcp), you'll install a bunch of functional client utilities automaticly (ssh, lynx, ncftp) and you will then get dumped to a bash# prompt.

To install everything from here, you'll want to type:
1) getpkg libdb
2) getpkg perlbin
3) getpkg perlcore
4) getpkg perlsite
5) getpkg perlmods

Permanantly adding the 5 above packages to the installation list of this floppy image is done by:
1) fmount ## mounting the image
2) cd /floppy/tux/config ## changing to the config dir
3) edit the pkglist file with vi/nano/cat and add the 5 package names.
4) cd / ## moving off the floppy
5) fumount ## unmounting the floppy image, which is now saved.

Now finally, dump yourself in code heaven:
1) perl -d -e 1

And enjoy. I shal now sleep better at night.

Sincerely,
Steven Fountain (cider@compulsion.org)

Visit the trinux website for additional information and documentation, this howto is meant to enhance the impact delivery factor of the available features.