Re: And now for something completely different... etch!
On Sunday 12 June 2005 08:38, Frans Pop <fjp@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sunday 12 June 2005 00:24, Russell Coker wrote:
> > New laptops tend to ship without floppy drives and desktop machines
> > will surely follow soon. Plans for future hardware support should not
> > involve floppy disks.
>
> Please, we do not only support new hardware.
> I have a very nice Pentium I (my internet gateway) that has a broken
> CD-drive and no USB (and certainly wouldn't boot from USB even if it had)
> but that installs perfectly from floppy.
I have a couple of very nice Cobalt machines that have no option for booting
from removable media. I installed Debian on them by removing the hard disks
and using a desktop machine to do the install. The same method would work
for broken hardware such as you possess.
> There are also other platforms that only do floppy boots (older macs,
> probably m68k too).
It seems that M68K Macs will be different from all other supported machines in
every way. There's no reason to upgrade the Debian install process on those
machines.
> IMO we should try very hard to keep floppy installation supported.
There's nothing stopping someone who has ancient hardware from installing
Woody or Sarge and then upgrading. There's no reason for us not to require
that the installer only support hardware that is <10 years old and fully
functional.
Incidentally the going price for CD-ROM drives is $10 or less.
--
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