On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 03:41:36PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> It is becoming increasingly difficult maintaining the
> bootfloppy-{small,tiny} and rescue-tiny boot floppy images.
> 
> If we stopped supporting them, would this materially inconvenience
> anyone? Has anyone here used any of these images recently?  Hardware
> that needs either of these is now quite old, and it is always possible
> to build a custom boot floppy if needed.

I recently tried using an old 486 notebook as a router (between two
prmcia NICs). If the thing did not die I would happily use it. But since
it did I got a hw ap instead.

It had only 3.8M ram and I never got 2.0 floppy working on it. I had to
use 1.6 floppy with custom stripped-down kernel and wiconfig.
(or was it 2.0 stripped-down kernel and 1.6 only customized because of
wi - I am not sure)

I expect that the current small floppy would be usable on 586 notebooks
for the same purpose. If it is removed, it would be hard for me to put
it together manually.

I cannot expect the developers to keep the tiny floppy around just in
case I got another old notebook. But other people may want the
functionality as well.

Also some very small embedded 386 systems may have similar parameters.
However, the smallest current system I found is dimm pc and it has 16MB
of ram. So I guess tiny is already obsolete.

Thanks

Michal Suchanek