Proposal for a new installation boot concept

[Christoph Lameter <clameter@waterf.org>]

I have been thinking about how to best get the boot and installation
hassle solved:

We want
- One Boot disk or none
- base.tar.gz loadable from somewhere that is not a floppy disk
- flexible and easy configuration even if you just have dos running
  (I assume that is the major reason syslinux was chosen)

We have the following problems:
- syslinux is outdated and does not support INITRD which would allow
  putting a compressed root image on the boot disk.
- No one has touched the boot process since awhile it seems.

Proposal:
1. The boot process from the boot disk starts FreeDOS. Once in FreeDOS the
   user can operate on a known MS-DOS level until all troubleshooting has
   been done and the kernel operates.

2. Loading the Linux Kernel via loadlin. Loadlin is included on the
   bootdisks. The user can simply fire up a linux kernel with all the
   parameters one wishes from the FreeDOS command line.

3. The Bootdisks contain a compressed root disk image which can be loaded
   via loadlin. As much as possible the content of the root disks is
   put into the base system (Candidates: Network configuration, Base
   System configuration, Contents of Kernel binary package).
   I measured how much space a gzip-9ed root floppy image takes right
   now: 550K! Should be fairly easy to get enough space together.

4. The current texts for syslinux are converted into batchfiles for
   FreeDOS.

5. The bootdisk contains modules/functionality to allow installing
   of a base.tar.gz from most standard CD-Roms, and via standard network
   cards. Space permitting PPP should also be included.
   The bootdisk can be upgraded by simply copying a Linux device driver
   to the disk (in case someone has special hardware).

fdos and loadlin are available as Debian packages as of today and can be
had from master.debian.org:Incoming.

Oh I forgot:

6. Junk syslinux.

Feedback is appreciated if possible soon or I might just do it.

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