Re: alpha cds bootable?
On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 15:59, Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Recently I noticed that changes had been done to the
> debian-cd/tools/boot/sarge/boot-alpha script, so as today I was upgrading
> all the cd building stuff on gluck I thought I should give this a try and
> check to see if the alpha cds were buildable.
>
> The thing was that when I looked at this script I found there stuff for an
> isolinux boot instead of the old stuff which used to call isomarkboot and
> all that.
>
> I know almost nothing about alphas, but I don't think they can run the
> isolinux code, as it is prety much i386 code, so... why is this isolinux
> there? am I wrong? why not the old style of making the cds?
>
> Well, as you see I'm pretty clueless about this, so any comment will be
> welcome.
>
I'd love to see the alpha CDs work; we didn't have time to do so at
debconf. There were some problems building busybox; patches were made;
if they've made it back to mainstream, then great.
isolinux is a new-ish format for bootable CDs. It means that the booting
code can be > 2.8 MB ("double size floppy"). Some of the images used in
woody were isolinux; older computers can't boot isolinux CDs, so in
debian installer we avoid it, and instead the 2.8 MB image has enough
code to boot the rest of the installer off the CD. At least thats the
case for i386; the larger code sizes may change things on alphas.
I don't know whether alphas can boot ISOLINUX format. If not, we will
need to juggle packages to make everything fit in 2.8 MB on alpha.
> Regards...
Alastair
--
Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org>
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