Re: boot-floppies status from an insider (was Re: Deficiencies in Debian)
On Thu, Sep 23, 1999 at 09:52:02AM +0200, Florian Lohoff wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 1999 at 11:19:20PM +0100, Martin Keegan wrote:
> > On 22 Sep 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> >
> > > At this point we are *so* far behind I'd rather just drop old
> > > hardware, or rather, if people wanna work on it and get it going, then
> > > fine, if not, we drop it. No biggie.
> > >
> > > Note that there *do* seem to be people fighting for 5.25" floppy
> > > support yet (which is pretty easy to do I guess).
> >
> > I have secured access to a box with a 5.25 for testing this.
> >
> > > Lowmem is another story though. I don't think even the slink
> > > boot-floppies worked right for lowmem, so I would propose to
> > > back-burner that, and if we don't get around to it, so what. :)
> >
> > It's unlikely that a site techie enough still to be using an x86 box with
> > <8Mb of RAM is not also going to have ethernet or a CD rom drive.
>
> I prefer dropping very rare situations. A techie is able to resolve them
> easily (Plug the drive into a second machine etc).
>
> Currently i see the problem with the 99% people having the
> biggest hardware (CD, Ethernet, >128MB, Floppy, >10GB HD) but
> who dont have the smallest clue what a "lilo" and a "kernel-module" is.
>
> So this is a political question. Do we want to support 4-8 year old
> hardware which is quiet uncommon now - Or are we heading mainstream.
>
> My preference would be - Large steps direction mainstream, gfx installer,
> drop support for installation without cd or network, drop support
> for 5 1/4" and <16MB.
>
> With this you have 90% of all Users. For the 10% left we might get
> some quick'n'dirty hacks with getting a dump from an nfs server
> automatical or something.
This is _not_ true.
Maybe this situation is common in United States or other rich countries, but
you are forgetting about all the rest of the world.
For example here in Poland it is still _very_ common for peole either in
some firms or in schools (you have to know that schools are _very_ poor here
- there is an average of _two_ computers for one school in Poland!) to
install Linux on an old 386 or 486 standing in the corner being incapable of
running Wingdows98 or 95 just in order to learn how it works and see if it
is able to replace the high-end NT box used as the main server.
In fact i am currently installing Debian on a 486 with 8MB RAM and no CD
only by chance having an ethernet card, for a school!
And i think the situation like this is not only true for Poland. There still
are many poorer countries than Poland. Don't forget that price of a nice,
new computer is equal to about 3 average salaries here! Computers are still
expensive in some parts of the world!
I agree however, that _most_ of the installation problems comes from
situations you pointed out (HD > 10GB, newest, not yet supported GFX card,
etc). Anyway I think that it is not sufficient to drop support for older
hardware, all the more that AFAIK Debian is the distro with least hardware
requirements. If Debian drops support for these old boxes, it will hardly be
possible to use Linux on them.
The way to solve this problem seems to be to make several sets of boot
floppies for x86 like:
- high-end hardware (large disk, maybe soundcard support and a gfx install)
- low-end hardware (little memory, maybe a 'floppy-only install')
- (recently proposed) laptop (propietary hardware, PCIMCIA support)
Are there any cons of making more than one floppies set for x86?
Marcin
--
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Marcin Owsiany
porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl
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