Re: Why are base 1 through 3 not compressed?

[Bruce Perens <bruce@Pixar.com>]

> Is there a reason why the base things are not compressed
> in the same way that bootdisk and rootdisk are?

The three base disks are a single compressed tar archive. You can actually
get back to the compressed archive if you strip the 512-byte header from
the front of each disk file, and concatenate the result together. I haven't
tried this, but the following should work:

	dd if=1440_base_floppy-1 of=1 bs=512 skip=1
	dd if=1440_base_floppy-2 of=2 bs=512 skip=1
	dd if=1440_base_floppy-3 of=3 bs=512 skip=1
	cat 1 2 3 | gunzip | tar tvf -

You can do this all on one line as a pipeline without intermediate files
if you want to be clever.

If you download boot-floppies-0.93.6-18.tar.gz, it contains the source
for the floppy_split and floppy_merge utilities. Besides performing the
binary split and merge task, they verify the disks using a simple checksum
and prompt and inform the user. The base installation command is the
equivalent of:

	floppy_merge /dev/fd0 | tar xvlzf -

You could use floppy_split and floppy_merge to move a large tar archive
or any other file to your system, given access to a raw-write-capable
floppy drive.

	Bruce