Re: CD issues
Stuart Lamble:
> Steve Dunham <dunham@dunham.tcimet.net> wrote:
> >base1_2.tgz should be sufficient. The key issue seems to be finding
> >and mounting the CD. Apparently, the loadable modules are on the drv
> >disk. How much is in the kernel on the boot disk? We may need to
>
> Well, we could skip over one-disk installs, and go straight to CD
> installs, in which case we only need the kernel on the CD to hold
> all the needed drivers :-) The only problem here is possibly memory -
> installing on 4MB systems would be tight. In fact, IIRC, only the
Another problem is that some of the CD-ROM drivers don't probe safely,
messing up other devices in the process (hard lockups, mis-identifying
ethernet cards as CD-ROMs, etc.). I have seen this with the current
boot floppy on two fairly standard machines (with NE2000 and SMC Ultra
ethernet cards). So these drivers really need to be loadable modules.
How about a compromise: floppy-less install from ATAPI and SCSI CD-ROM
drives, the drivers floppy still required for the other CD-ROM types.
Very few people will notice - 99% of currently used CD-ROMs are ATAPI
or SCSI, the "proprietary" ones are mostly historic 1x and 2x drives.
> >> The step after _that_ is to allow booting just off the CD: create the
> >> /usr, /etc, /bin, etc. directories on the CD (possibly in a subdirectory,
> >> with symlinks) with the same files as on the root disk.
> >
> >How would you make it read-write?
No need for that, initrd can be used as the root filesystem (and in fact
it is already used this way on the current boot disk). The initrd image
can be loaded from DOS using loadlin (BTW: the current version is 1.6,
and in the tools directory on the ftp site there is still version 1.5
which doesn't support initrd).
Making the CDs bootable, so you can install without floppies and without
DOS (newer BIOSes support booting from a CD) is another story. Last time
I heard, mkisofs didn't support that yet but someone was working on it...
Marek
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