Re: ELF floppy set progress report
On Thu, 7 Mar 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
> No-floppy boot from real-mode DOS is possible using LOADLIN. Syslinux
> could be put on an ISO filesystem with a bit of hacking, and it would
> work for some SCSI CDs on Adaptec controllers. This gets esoteric, though.
Using LOADLIN is what I meant for a no-floppy installation. The bootable
CD spec is something completely different; basically it provides for an
amount of data to be loaded into memory and then a particular location
jumped to; the data is stored at a specific extent in the ISO filesystem.
mkisofs would have to be hacked to support this, but this should be quite
easy. It's esoteric at the moment, but likely to become a lot less so
with the proliferation of ATAPI CD-ROMs and BIOSes that can drive them.
> > When watching people install Debian from your CD, I've noticed that they
> > get slightly worried about having to tell it to install from CD twice;
> > once for the base system, and then again for the dselect installation
> > method. If the base is installed from CD, could this be saved in
> > /var/lib/dpkg/{cmethopt,methods/disk/shvar.cdrom} so that the user isn't
> > asked again?
>
> I don't think this will be a problem, as I don't use the half-installed
> state for the base packages under 1.1 . The entire packages are installed.
> Dselect should see that they don't need to be updated.
That wasn't what I meant. The first time people run dselect on their
newly-installed base system, it asks them where they want to install
from. If they have installed the base system from CD-ROM then the system
should already know this, and shouldn't have to ask. Some people are
surprised when they have to supply the information again, and in some
cases are worried that they have done something wrong.
Steve Early
sde1000@cam.ac.uk
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