boot floppies [was Re: Woody Freeze Plans - Progress Report]
On 7 Apr 2001, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> > Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> > >Nobody uses floppies anymore, we should focus on the boot-cd, imho.
> >
> > There are still lots of old machines around that won't boot from CD.
>
> Of course, take Nobody with a grain of salt. But all those old
> systems are already running debian, no need for new install. I expect
> that most new installs by far should be done booting from CD, esp. in
> the powerpc world. Anyway, it looks like boot-floppies means that I
> can install woody/powerpc from CD, so all is right.
I've used two floppies to install about 10 debian machines at work - the
floppies just provide the initial system, the rest is installed over the
network (all machines have network access). I even installed Debian on a
machine /without/ floppy or CD drive (but four 75 GB harddisks) using PXE,
pxelinux, and a slightly modified version of the two Compact floppy
images. (PXE is a way of making PCs boot over a network, it works with
3Com and Intel nics - there are /many/ bugs in the firmware but is still
quite manageable). So I, for one, would sorely miss real boot floppies.
-Peter, Manager of Development, One2One Networks A/S
Real computer scientists don't program in assembler. They don't write
in anything less portable than a number two pencil.
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