On Sun, Jul 19, 1998 at 10:24:23PM +0100, Enrique Zanardi wrote: > As you may know, our current boot floppy for i386 uses syslinux as its > bootloader. It uses syslinux "safe, slow and stupid" mode to be able to > boot in machines with weird BIOSes. The problem is that mode is painfully > slow (I've received reports of ~4 minutes to boot in several machines, > including some new Pentium II!). Floppies are slow, what can I say? > As CDs are a lot faster than floppies, it's OK to use "-s" for the boot > image on the official CDs, but I'm thinking about going back to the normal > mode for the floppy images, and adding a README file giving instructions > for replacing syslinux on the rescue floppy to build a "-s" floppy, just > in case the user has one of the machines that don't like the normal mode. > (It as simple as inserting the floppy on the drive and running > "syslinux -s /dev/fd0" as root). That information may be added to the > install docs instead/also. As I just started with the very beginnings of playing with a "big rescue disk", I have discovered all of this. Suggestion is that if you go this route, get the syslinux dos program and make it available in tools, gonna need that for zip and other such big disks anyway---it just wouldn't work to rawrite this thing in dos and rawrite wouldn't do it anyway. For this you take a fileset, copy it onto the zip disk and run syslinux (batch file can automate this on the CD, a sh script in linux, etc.. Still working on a /linuxrc to find the rescue disk since it can be any IDE or SCSI device on the system... I wanna make the search for the right media a little smarter than for each possible combination. At LEAST I oughtta bring that down list to only combinations that actually exist.. => Course, this is another thread. > As there's a minor problem in the current boot-flopies set (dselect adds > some packages to the ones selected using "profiles", sometimes leading > to conflicts), we probably need another boot-floppies release one way or > the other. Go ahead and take out the -s if it makes a real difference. Just make the dos version of the syslinux program available. -MY- weird BIOS works as badly either way.. I can't boot linux from the CD or the batch file on it. I can boot a floppy and use a CD from there.
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