Even if so, I don't believe potato's "compact" boot floppy could boot on the machine as potato's syslinux didn't boot Linux on such a machine, although woody's one may. As a commercial tech support, I recently had to make a kernel with USB, a new syslinux, a set of boot floppies, and a bootable CD image for our customer to boot Debian 2.2 on his machine. So my current question is this: will woody support his machine out of the box?
Eduard Bloch wrote:
Look at the subject, we are talking about keyboard/mouse modules. The ability to boot may be not guaranteed on a such machine with the normal floppies, but that problem has been discussed on this list and the "compact" flavor should work on such systems, IIRC.
AFAIK there is no difference in "direct access" vs. "BIOS access". Keyboard usage is allways did the same way, not like int13h (XT harddisk emulation, also known as DOS IDE BIOS mode) or similar crap.
Today I see a difference on a legacy-free machine. Is that my misunderstanding, then?
Oh, I found the keyboard hardware emulation requirements in the PC99 Design Guide, but *not* in the PC 2001 Design Guide. (See <URL:http://www.pcdesguide.org/pc2001/default.htm>.) PC 2001 even requires to prevent the keyboard ports from being detected by the OS on a legacy-free PC. Some old programs might not work, but it would be OK if the machine is legacy-free.
So, do you say Debian doesn't officially support any PC 2001 legacy-free PCs? I hope you wouldn't.