[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

RE: why one rescue & boot disk? (was Re: An 'ae' testimony)




On Mon, 24 May 1999 Dean.Carpenter@pharma.com wrote:

> : superb, IMHO that's called a Live-CD. Would it be possible to
> : integrate the creation stuff into the debian-cd script? It would be
> : really nice if people can test Debian on a CD-ROM first.
> 
> And it would be triply cool if you could front end it with a small kernel
> selector, to pick a kernel that supports your hardware.  The current kernels
> are pretty good, but there are a couple of choices.  Then it could be a
> generic rescue CD.

In some of my test disks, I have included ide (and sbpcd) support in the
kernel.  After booting, the modules for sound, printing, serial, etc,
are on the CD and can be loaded.  A ide/scsi boot kernel should cover a
large number of systems that can boot off CD.  The disk is rather
tight on space, and modules for sbpcd, aztcd, etc, don't fit on the
boot disk.  I'd need a mount a second floppy to get load the modules.

As a side not, since the el torito CD's can use 1.44 or 2.88 meg
boot images, a 2.88 meg boot image would provide a lot of space for
jumbo kernels.  I don't have a 2.88 meg drive, and haven't found
a way to make one without one.  If someone could send me the image
of a 2.88 meg disk that has been made bootable with syslinux, I'd
appreciate it.

> 
> And by the way, why isn't this a package ?  At least the iso-image
> generation part of it if the cd image is too big (I would think it is).
> Share the wealth, this sounds like a really, really nice tool.

A few reasons.
1) I still consider my scripts to be in alpha development
2) In its current form, LiveCD depends on patches to the kernel to
load a .tgz file as the root file system.  The patch does seem
to make the kernel bigger, but at this stage (alpha code), it makes
the development cycle much easier than trying to create a boot disk
with a compressed file system on it.
3)  Other people havent shown much interest in the project.
4)  I'm not a developer.

Mark Blunier



Reply to: