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On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 02:03:17AM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> > What about hard drive emulation that El Torrito also supports?
>=20
> The problem is that there are machines out there that *only*
> support the virtual-floppy boot method.  I used to have one on my desk. :=
-/

And there are worse than that, including some that only support 1.44Mb
emulated floppies, and of course a whole class of machines that can't
boot from cd at all for one reason or another.

The thing that's got us all gridlocked and causes trouble every time
the install floppies blow out for size, is that we're trying to cram
two things into one:

 - a bootable kernel that fits on small media, including emulated
   media.

 - a runnable filesystem image with functional and user-friendly
   installation and recovery tools, graphical or otherwise.

If we decouple these things, and/or bundle the latter with the install
sets on an .iso that may also include a bootable kernel for those
machines that can cope with one, as I outlined in another post, we can
improve life for almost all cases.

The one case that I can think of which doesn't fit quite as easily is
the floppy-only install, with sets fetched by FTP directly from the
project servers/mirrors.  It may be that installs on such machines
will need to involve other local infrastructure for (eg) NFS or SMB or
even eventually iSCSI mounting of the install filesystem image (via
vnd, as needed), or that some enterprising developer with A Need
builds another mechanism, like allowing multiple floppies or ftp to
untar the filesystem image into a tmpfs before init.chrooting to it.

--
Dan.

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