Ok, it was suggested on #gentoo that I file a bug report with this question. If this wasn't the proper way feel free to just close it out. Anyway, with the lack of an official gentoo install floppy and the tomsbrt floppy no longer working (kernel's too old) the slackware install floppies are now the easiest way for someone without a cdrom drive to install gentoo. The only problem is they don't offer bzip2. But since the slack floppies can do networking, wget, supports XFS, ReiserFS, pcmcia, etc. they really are an excellent option. Would it be possible to get a a gzipped stage1 on the mirrors for x86? stage2 and stage3 but would be nice but takes up quite a bit more space than the 14 megs a stage1 tarball would. I'd stick stage1 up myself but I sadly my speakeasy account doesn't offer enough space. I'd also be glad to write up an install doc for using them.
Ok, since I'm a big honking dork I didn't even think of just using a statically linked bzip2 binary for uncompressing the various stages. Anyway, http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/ offers a statically linked linux binary for x86 that I've verified will uncompress the stages (bzip2 -d <stage>). It's not a pain telling folks to wget it from a different site but any chance of getting a static binary on the mirrors? If only to avoid the obligatory questions like 'But this is a RedHat binary? How will it work on Gentoo?!?!' ;-P
Slack bootdisks + wgetted bzip2 seems to work; closing.
