Re: Strategy for boot-floppies

[Martin Schulze <joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE>]

Hartmut Koptein wrote:
> >    Create a 2.88MB floppy to use as ElTorito boot image.  This floppy
> >    will contain the kernel and the root image.
> > 
> > > This sounds good.  I wonder if certain BIOS's will puke on it.
> 
> Is this the right way? I thought the only two reasons for a floppy based installation
> are:
> 
>    * the user has no cdrom nor net connection
>    * for router
> 
> Can every floppy drive read 2.88, or only newer boards, what about router and user with
> an ls120 drive?

No, only very few can read them.  However, it should give us a
smooth installation when booting from cdrom.

I don't know if it is the right way, at least it is one way.

> We're going to have more and more trouble with this old floppy setup method. We should 
> break it and support only cdrom and one 1.44 floppy for routers and nfs/tftp/bootp booting
> or to boot from the cdrom.

I disagree here.  We need to be able to boot off of floppies.  I've done
many installations were floppies were the only method or I was in some
major trouble.  Anyway, if we plan properly this is not a new problem,
it will "only" result in more floppies one needs, unfortunately.

The current setup doesn't work with only one 1.44MB floppy since either
our kernel or the ramdisk doesn't fit, nor does the drivers disk which
is needed to access the network later on.

> The current is a big pain and 9 or more base*bin aren't nice, even for the user. 

Exactly.  In my opinion this means we have to reduce this (I gave up
on that issue..) or use every possibility to read the base system from
some other media which might be available without threatening the user
to reconfigure other machines or nag the admin or else.

Regards,

	Joey

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