Re: ToDo List for the Boot Floppies Package

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es>]

On Mon, Jan 11, 1999 at 11:39:36PM -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Jan 1999 17:27:07 +0100 (CET), Jens Ritter <jens@hilbert.weh.rwth-aachen.de> said:
> > As I put the work on this on a hold (due to lesser spare time on my
> > side, the deep freeze and etc.), I am at the moment not very
> > familiar with how it is done. I know that you have a initramdisk
> > where the autoexec.bat analogon for linux mounts the root filesystem
> > from a loopbackdevice and then "remounts" the to be root file system
> > from an already (loopback) mounted filesystem. You might be able to
> > modify this script to do automatic screening for an linux image...
> 
> > P.S.: Status of DropInDebian: The dbootstrap (?) program is
> > modified, and you are able to install debian in a file on a dos
> > partition (e.g.), but you have got to do most of the creation of
> > files and mounting by hand. In addition the initramdisk is not
> > modified automatically.
> 
> What are the chances we could merge this for potato into the
> mainstream boot floppies?  I'd like to add documentation in the
> Installation Manual too.

Part of that functionality is already on the boot-floppies. As of
boot-floppies_2.1.4, dbootstrap let's you use a loop-mounted fs as
target (I still have to hack in suport for detecting active swap files.
With the new /proc/swaps file on 2.2.x kernels that'll be really easy).

As with Jens patches, you have to create and mount the files by hand, and
there's no support for creating/modifying the initramdisk, but that's on
the TODO list. I may work on this for boot-floppies_2.1.5, but don't hold
your breath.
 
> But you're right, we're too late for slink here.

Not quite. The initramdisk stuff is the hardest part, but adding support
for creating & mounting the files may be doable for slink.

--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es