Boot stage WAS Re: Booting to floppy
At 21:34 +0100 3/3/01, Michael Schmitz wrote:
>> > syslinux actually. and it can take a root= argument but if you don't
>> > give a root= argument you get a root disk prompt.
>>
>> Yeah, that's what I said/meant. The boot-floppy-hfs.img floppy
>> doesn't work the same way as the rescue floppy does for other
>> architectures. My point is that for powerpc, the "rescue" function
>
>The 'rescue floppy' doesn't even work as this on a whole other bunch of
>architectures I bet. Can you boot from this floppy on sparc? Alpha might
>work. None of the m68k machines will boot from it if you happened to kill
>the machine's old OS.
>Call it 'kernel floppy image' and emphasize that there's no need to copy
>it to a floppy disk on those architecures that can't boot from floppy, and
>maybe people will understand.
>
>> of the floppy with the word "rescue" in it's image file name is
>> somewhat impotent. This can be somewhat confusing if you're not a
>> graduate of the powerpc debian booting/installing gauntlet. Most
>> especially because of the way the generic debian install docs refer
>> to the rescue floppy for everything.
>
>That one-size-fits-all install doc is truely evil, even with all the
>arch-specific customizations. True, once you're booted into the installer
>it works the same for all architectures. The steps leading up to that are
>just too different.
>
>Alternatives? We used to have a separate quick reference style install
>guide for installation on Amiga, Atari, Mac and perhaps VME on m68k. That
>was considered a bad idea by the boot-floppies team, and we tried to fold
>the specific 'what files to get, how to boot' instructions into the
>generic docs. Confusion ensued. I now think having separate documents that
>detail the initial steps (choice of install method, partitioning,
>reinstalling your OS, what install files to get, how to unpack them, how to
>boot the installer, how to boot into the installed system finally) would be
>the easiest way to solve the problem. For PPC, separate descriptions for
>oldworld (miboot or BootX) and newworld (yaboot) as well as CHRP/PREP and
>other flavors might make sense.
>
>For the remaining tasks, the generic install doc is the better guide
>indeed. My statement above didn't mean I'd like to replace the generic
>docs with per-arch ones. Just separate out the specific things to be more
>flexible in structuring the description.
>
"Boot-floppies" isn't the best name for this software.
Could we change the name into "boot-stage"?
This name covers also issues as
- CD ROMs, even Bissness Card size CD
- Using another O.S. as "bootloader"
- Network booting
Another name that avoids the reference to floppies would also be fine.
BTW this mailing list is called just "debian-boot"
Groet Geert Stappers
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