Re: debian-installer mechanisms

[Phil Blundell <pb@nexus.co.uk>]

Wookey wrote:

> Netwinder
> ---------
> Small desktop/router device
> Normal keyboard, mouse, screen (optional)
> Boot from flash, ?
> Install from CD, Net
> Install to HD

All netwinders have at least one onboard ethernet, and very few of them
have SCSI.  So, the overwhelming majority of netwinder installs are
tftp-booted with packages retrieved from the network.  Console can be
either serial or VGA/PS2; the firmware supports both.  Making a
netwinder tftp image is easy, just a case of "cat Image ramdisk.gz >
tftpboot.img".

CATS also falls under the "netwinder" subarch and uses the same kernels.
The drill for installing on these is much the same as well.  Making a
CATS bootable image is done with the catsboot program, which sticks the
kernel and ramdisk together with a bit of glue code.  CATS do often have
CD drives, so building CD images would be a worthwhile thing to do.

p.