booting/installing debian-alpha

[Kristoffer.Rose@ens-lyon.fr]

Dear Andreas,

> i'm working on the cd images, includeing for debian alpha.  i have no
> idea what to do, other than copying the alpha binaries to the
> cdrom. there isn't even an install document that i could copy to the / of
> the cdrom...

What is the layout you use?

Remember that users have to *type in* full paths on the alpha.  So it is
bad news if the images are burried somewhere deep inside some
dists/.../disks-alpha/... hierarchy (it might even make booting directly
from the CD-ROM impossible due to limits on the length of strings).

IMO the most convenient layout is to have at the root something like

	/alpha/base2_0.tgz
	/alpha/root.bin

and then - for each <arch> of Alpha, i.e., avanti, miata, udb, etc., a
subdirectory containing

	/alpha/<arch>/milo
	/alpha/<arch>/vmlinux.gz
	/alpha/<arch>/resc1440.bin
	/alpha/<arch>/drv1440.bin

Unfortunately this is not efficient: it means about 4M per <arch> of which
at least a dozen are in common use.  But it does make the installation
easy: users should just create a "boot selection" with

> if i can do anything, please contact me ...

Yes, please publicize the layout of the CD-ROM so we can comment on it from 
a multi-architectural viewpoint...i.e., should the layout be such that we
can, once the DVDs get normal, put all distributions (source + i386 + alpha 
+ ...) on the same DVD, or what?

Cheers,
	Kristoffer

-- 
Kristoffer Høgsbro Rose, Ph.D., prof.associé  <Kristoffer.Rose@ENS-Lyon.FR>
Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme  équipe PLUME, bureau LR5-026
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon; 46, Allée d'Italie; F-69364 Lyon 07 cedex
phone: +33(0)4 7272 8642; fax:...8080    <http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~krisrose>


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