On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:00:40PM +1030, Daniel O'Connor wrote: > You still need the right drivers, ie which SCSI controller/network/... cards > you have to get a minimal install is _more_ when you are doing FTP (you need > a network).
Out of around 300+ installs of FreeBSD I've done over the last few years, about 12 of them were by CD. The rest were FTP kick-started off floppy. Normally, because I happened to have the two floppies I needed in my shirt pocket. Since 4.x I have never had a problem with drivers, depsite installing on a range of hardware from non-branded Taiwanese notebooks through to £30k enterprise servers. I don't see the problem with floppy install. However, as Jordan said when discussing libh (http://rtp1.slowblink.com/~libh/sysinstall2/improvements.html): "As I mentioned in Section 2.3, one of the more annoying problems with FreeBSD's current distribution format is the dividing line between distributions and packages. There should really only be one type of "distribution format" and, of course, it should be the package (There Can Be Only One). Achieving this means we're first going to have to grapple with several problems, however: First, eliminating the distribution format means either teaching the package tools how to deal with a split archive format (they currently do not) or divorcing ourselves forever from floppies as a distribution medium. This is an issue which would seem an easy one to decide but invariably becomes Highly Religious(tm) every time it's brought up. In some dark corner of the world, there always seems to be somebody still installing FreeBSD via floppies and even some of the fortune 500 folks can cite FreeBSD success stories where they resurrected some old 386 box (with only a floppy drive and no networking/CD/...) and turned it into the star of the office/saved the company/etc etc. That's not to say we can't still bite that particular bullet, just that it's not a decision which will go down easily with everyone and should be well thought-out." I should point out, this appears to have been written some time ago, late 2002 I'm guessing. -- Paul Robinson _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
