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Re: boot floppies and syslinux "-s" mode



On Mon, Jul 20, 1998 at 10:00:05AM +0200, fog@irfmn.mnegri.it wrote:
> Just one comment. If you have a fast box (Pentium) there is a hight chance
> you also have a CD-Rom. I think the only people booting from floppy are
> the ones with old 486 and the -s option doesn't make much difference
> in that case (or does it?). Ciao,
> 
> 					    Federico

It does make a difference. I've got a Pentium 75 and a CDROM but I can't boot
from a CD.

> 
> 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!).
> > 
> > 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 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.
> > 
> > Comments?

While testing the fix for the profiles problem I ran into the slow boot. The
rescue floppy loaded at normal speed but the boot floppy which was generated
at the end of dinstall was _really_ slow loading (~ 5min). It's definitely
a strange phenomenon from the point of view of a normal user.

Greetings,


				Christian
-- 
Christian Meder, email: meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de
 
What's the railroad to me ?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows, 
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.
                      (Henry David Thoreau)
 


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