Re: help - vanishing keyboard

[Douglas Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 09:13:29PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
 
> Cheers,
> FJP
> 
> P.S. Post-Etch I think we'll have to look at reducing the size of the 
> kernel for floppy boots. It stands to reason that new releases will soon 
> overflow the boot floppy again. Maybe we'll need a special flavor after 
> all.

Frans,

I am in no way a kernel programmer.

Looking at the man page for initrd I'm focusing on step 1:

	1.  The boot loader loads the kernel program and /dev/initrd's
	contents into memory.

Perhaps a boot loader could be written (or grub or syslinux modified) to
take the kernel and initrd in floppy-size chunks and assemble them in
memory before kernel booting.

I guess I'm thinking that rather than have to redo the installer for a
minimal floppy kernel, it may be possible to find a way to get a regular
kernel booted using only floppy media.

Can a system that can't boot from CD still have the floppy-booted boot
loader load the kernel and initrd from CD into memory and boot that?

To me, its an intreguing puzzle.

Doug.