Re: root disk

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@worldvisions.ca>]

On Wed, Oct 21, 1998 at 01:04:36PM -0700, Nathan Myers wrote:

> Enrique Zanardi asked about whether it would be useful to have PPP 
> on the installation boot disk, for cases where the boot kernel (or 
> any kernel) has no access to a floppy drive or CD.  PPP might be 
> useful, but I don't know if it would be worth the space.  Almost 
> anywhere that you can get a fast enough serial link to be useful, 
> you can have a parallel connection instead.

Yes, we should have plip on the boot disks.  Don't we already? (I honestly
don't know.) _All_ kernel modules should be accessible before we install the
base system, I would think.  You need at least all the disk drivers and
filesystems to support all possible configurations...

As far as PPP goes... well, a tar.gz of pppd, wvdial, and wvdialconf (my
personal favourite way to connect :)) is 123k.  Pretty hefty for a 1440k
floppy.  wvdial+wvdialconf would be half the size if it weren't for @$!@#!@#
egcs, but that's another story.

I don't think ppp on the boot disks will get you too far, though.  You'll
need to add at _least_ the ftp command to make that useful, and I'm almost
certain there'll be no room for that.  Yes, NFS will work, but find me an
anonymous NFS Debian mirror if you dare :)

I think it's safe to leave PPP on the base system.  It's only a few disks
anyway, and it makes life a lot easier.

Or am I missing something that makes this technically feasible?

Have fun,

Avery

P.S. by the way, are me moving toward initrd yet?  All those unused drivers
in the default kernel worry me...