On Mon, Jun 28, 1999 at 11:40:38AM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > Ok, how do we fix this? This is seriously important to me and the continued > growth of debian. If I have to run and grab floppies whenever we need to > install on the VAIO, life will not be good. Sorry for just talking instead of the preferred Linux way of "showing the code" (serious lack of time). These are a few thoughts on this: a) for machines bootable from CD - Make a bootable CD with a 2.88MB bootimage. This should be enough for a kernel+rootfs(as initrd) to contain everything needed for pulling up the rest. This kernel won't need sound, no routing, ELF is enough, no joystick, no video, no mice, ext2 and ROMFS only. We can get at the rest in a later stage of the installation process. - Add a 1.44MB bootimage for BIOSes that don't support the bigger ones. Move a few more drivers to modules that need to be loaded from floppy. There must be a penalty for uncooperative hardware :-) I suggest to put the less common network and scsi drivers there. BTW: It would be useful to have a list stating the popularity of supported hardware. Ooops, what if there is no floppy? Ok, this might mean a third or even a fourth bootimage, with an assorted choice of drivers to cover all machines that still have neither floppy nor parallel port nor network available. b) for machines bootable from floppy - Like a), point 2, but the bootimages are on floppy, and a few unusable drivers could be on a second floppy c) are there machines that boot neither from floppy nor from CD? We should still support installation to low memory machines (where I consider <8MB as low memory) but the installation might become far less convenient on those, either juggling with floppies or making a specialized bootdisk. Which is rather simple yet for debian, but could even be made accessible to the average user that has access to a second machine: Let her select the hardware and construct bootdisk with everything necessary. But thats another project and I digress ... The concept is a two stage installer: 1) boot and load a system that is capable of just running the userspace programs needed to make the kernel able to access some mass media or network connection, i.e. isapnp, pcmcia cardmgr, pppd, whatever may be necessary for USB, etc. Hope this fits on a bootable image. 2) Load all other drivers and other kernel modules from there and continue with the fully enabled kernel. Nils -- Plug-and-Play is really nice, unfortunately it only works 50% of the time. To be specific the "Plug" almost always works. --unknown source
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