Re: Downloading and naming
Hi,
Brian Wengel wrote:
> Are we seriously discussing floppy images? :-P
As said, small is beautiful.
> I think it was a wrong place to target my post,
> as Mark pointed out
debian-cd mailing list would be my guess.
Nevertheless, it's much of a user related topic, too.
> The debian developers should erase CD/DVD from
> their brian
What kind of re-wording do you have in mind ?
I agree from a technical point of view that "CD/DVD" is wrong since the
isohybrid feature was added, Blu-ray media became popular, and non-x86
hardware architectures are supported by Debian.
The images are actually ISO 9660 filesystems with boot information
for the particular architectures' firmwares. Rock Ridge extensions
are present to let the booting Linux kernel work with long case-sensitive
filenames.
The distinction between optical drives and hard disk drives exists because
20 years ago IBM and others agreed on ISO 9660 and El Torito boot sectors
for CD-ROM. Originally this was kindof a superset which should offer
several virtual floppies (hehe) or hard disks to boot the CD-ROM on x86,
PowerPC, and Mac.
PowerPC and Mac soon switched to hard-disk-ish boot sectors on CD, but
x86 staid with El Torito and Intel later added a second firmware for its
hardware: EFI. It prescribes to boot from optical media via El Torito.
On hard-disk-ish media it boots via an MBR partition or a GPT partition.
Debian "netinst" ISOs for i386 or amd64 offer the boot information which
BIOS and EFI expect on optical media and on hard-disk-like devices.
Firmwares of some other Debian arches probably make few difference between
booting from CD-ROM and from hard disk. But i know that arm64 has EFI
and thus distinguishes like amd64.
Needed would be a common name for this family of things.
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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