Re: Strategy for boot-floppies

[Martin Schulze <joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE>]

Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> > This is what Haggie and myself were thinking about:
> > 
> >  . Booting via bootable CDROM
> > 
> >    Create a 2.88MB floppy to use as ElTorito boot image.  This floppy
> >    will contain the kernel and the root image.
> 
> This sounds good.  I wonder if certain BIOS's will puke on it.

We will have to find it out and we will have to do it NOW instead
of at release-time.

> >  . Support for ftp/tftp fetching of the base system
> 
> This is an old wishlist.  I believe it is pretty easy to implement
> (just gotta watch out for available space, etc).

Enrique already said that it's a matter of space.  However, if we decide
to split the rescue disk we have some space to fill.

> >    If so, would it be possible to fetch the root disk, i.e. the
> >    ramdisk, from the net?  If so, how can we boot off of the boot
> >    floppy to achieve this?
> 
> I've used TFTP to do complete floppyless installation, including
> boot/root/drivers, then installing the rest from a local CD.  This is

If you have a local CDROM you should not need a network to find the
root floppy.  Can this be made possible?

> already functional.  I believe this is the only way to accomplish
> this.  We can make it much easier, however, for instance, packaging an
> "install server" package that would run on the server, better
> documentation, better DHCP/BOOTP integration and testing and
> documentation.

Sounds good, especially if we are going to address cluster installations
wit only very few manual interactions.

> >  . Support for JAZZ/ZIP drives
> > 
> >    These drives are botable and may contain 100MB or even 250MB on
> >    it.  The minimum we should support is a system that people can just
> >    copy to their disk and boot off of it.
> > 
> >    [ dbootstrap: is it possible to detect a jazz/zip drive?  If so,
> >    look for drives, resc and base disks there without asking the
> >    user.]
> 
> For our own sanity, I think our model should just be the same 2.88 MB
> image.  It's a shame this doesn't work already -- it should, but there
> is apparently no boot-floppies hacker with one of these.  Could we get
> a donation or the use of SPI funds?

If this is the only thing that is missing, I would purchase one asap.
Three friends of mine have such a drive, two of them use Debian, one
of them is even a maintainer.  I'd like to first ask around for such
hardware.  If none is there I'm in favour of purchasing one out of
our funds.

So the questions are:

  a) Who has a JAZZ or ZIP drive and can teach us about booting off of
     it and

  b) Who is willing to work on support for it?

Regards,

	Joey

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