Re: slink boot disk notes
Brian Craft <bcboy@thecraftstudio.com> writes:
> one oddity: lowmemrd/linuxrc.c doesn't allow you to specify a minix
> partition if one was written previously. You can't choose the "exit"
> option without first rewriting the partition. Since it takes about
> 40-60 min on this 486 to uncompress the floppy & write the
> partition, this is an enormous loss anytime some minor thing goes
> wrong later in the install. Perhaps there should be an option to
> pick a minix partition if one was written previously. Perhaps also
> for initializing the swap partition. No need to run mkswap every
> time.
Ok -- lowmem installation is not on the top of our priority list, but
we realize it was *very* suboptimally handled in slink. We'll either
improve it, or we'll have to drop it entirely.
> I also discovered (the hard way) that the base floppies that are
> http linked on the slink install guide for i386 are not the same as
> the i386 floppies on the slink ftp site. I grabbed one from the web
> site & the rest from the ftp site, with the result that the base
> floppies silently failed to install. The unzip failed because the
> 1st & 2nd floppies don't fit together, which generated no error
> message, but asked me to install the base system again. dinstall
> appears to do some sort of header checking on the floppies, but it
> failed to catch this. I didn't discover it before merging the files
> by hand with dd.
Ugh. Well, there will be *no* files on the web site for 2.2 release.
We're going to have the links in the documentation go to
http.us.debian.org (language-dependant override available) so it will
get the files from the same source.
I was asked to go back and fix this in slink but frankly I don't have
time to do it...
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
Reply to: