Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Right, we'll want to add help screens to syslinux for all of our images in any case. I think I understand now, isolinux uses its own help screens which it reads from the CD, and these come from debian-cd (for now..), but we can control the rest of them. That's it. I don't particularly want to make the decision about which CD has isolinux on it and which uses the old method. I do want to get the help texts straightened out and preferably in one place, and I do want to Sounds reasonable, we can get the texts out of a package, for example, one thing that would be good is if we didn't need root for getting those texts, avoid things like loop mounting and so. have a netinst CD without isolinux on it. Anything you guys decide that accomplishes that is 100% fine with me, you are the ones who know all about isolinux. Seems like isolinux has put some bugfixes to avoid problems with broken bioses and they work, at least my scsi bios can boot from sarge's cds but not from woody's first cd. We can build two netinst sets for now if you want, but I'd rather build test images with the last version of isolinux in debug mode before making a decision on all this, anybody objects on building this kind of images and asking the people that wrote the bugs to test them so that we can get feedback on this? Regards... -- Manty/BestiaTester - http://manty.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Le Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 09:00:12PM +0100, Santiago Garcia Mantinan écrivait: We can build two netinst sets for now if you want, but I'd rather build test images with the last version of isolinux in debug mode before making a decision on all this, anybody objects on building this kind of images and asking the people that wrote the bugs to test them so that we can get feedback on this? Go ahead ! Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com Earn money with free software: http://www.geniustrader.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Le Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 04:29:25PM -0500, Joey Hess écrivait: I have just tried it and it works, even though the setup for syslinux should be changed a bit to include the help screens and all that, this should be done in debian-installer, as it is d-i who makes that image. There are several advantages to having the syslinux help be part of d-i, including letting us reuse the same material for syslinux help on the boot floppy. What would be a good way for us to distribute the help texts so debian-cd could use them on the d-i cdroms? We don't need syslinux help files AFAIK. Syslinux is integrated into the boot image that you provide us. Maybe we could put isolinux on the *second* CD, with eventually an initrd that supports SCSI cdroms. That sounds fine with me if it is ok to drop the net initrd from the booting options of the cds. Well, I don't know what else to say, in the full cd set we really can have different booting methods, one on each cd, the important thing is to decide what do we put on the netinst/bussinesscard cds and also how do we order the methods in the full cd set. I think that the main problem from the d-i team's perspective is that all the daily cds and the cds for beta 1 use isolinux. So when users come to us who cannot boot from isolinux, we have no alternative except boot floppies or the monthly full cd builds. Any approach that provides at least one netinst cd without isolinux on it would be a help to this situation. Why did we use isolinux ? Because we wanted that most people could install Debian with the first CD ... and to cover all users we had to have several kernels, one generic and one more SCSI oriented (called compact at that time). If you tell me we support all users with a single kernel/initrd then fine ... I'll remove isolinux but if you tell me that we have to keep several kernels/initrd then I want to have those several kernel/initrd on the same netinst cd and I'll keep isolinux. We did tests last year before going on with isolinux and it was supported by most of the hardware. The few failures were on old hardware where they could fall back to another CD from the full CD set. But if you really need a netinst CD without isolinux, it's of course doable. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com Earn money with free software: http://www.geniustrader.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
I think that the main problem from the d-i team's perspective is that all the daily cds and the cds for beta 1 use isolinux. So when users come to us who cannot boot from isolinux, we have no alternative except boot floppies or the monthly full cd builds. Any approach that provides at least one netinst cd without isolinux on it would be a help to this situation. The full cd builds happen weekly, not monthly, every friday (yes, that is today). As for the rest of the things, Raphael has exposed things well, we can do whatever you want with the cds, in fact, the change is so easy that we just have to change one script to change the ordering of the boot methods in the cds, right now the first one is isolinux, the second one is boot floppy emulation with cdrom-image, so, we change the order and that's it. The only problem is that cdrom-image doesn't have any help, so it just echoes the prompt of syslinux and that's it. I believe that if you want to change the cd ordering or even have the same ordering in the full cd set, but have boot-floppy emulation booting in the netinst/businesscard cds, you just have to add the help screens to cdrom-image syslinux and when images with that config are build, you tell me and I make the changes and the new images, that's it. Regards... -- Manty/BestiaTester - http://manty.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Raphael Hertzog wrote: We don't need syslinux help files AFAIK. Syslinux is integrated into the boot image that you provide us. I'm confused. The current daily netinst cds display a lot of help text (mostly unmodified from the boot-floppies) on boot. This text is not present from d-i, so it must be added by debian-cd. As far as I can tell it's in the isolinux directory of the CD. f1.txt and so on. But if you really need a netinst CD without isolinux, it's of course doable. Ok.. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote: As for the rest of the things, Raphael has exposed things well, we can do whatever you want with the cds, in fact, the change is so easy that we just have to change one script to change the ordering of the boot methods in the cds, right now the first one is isolinux, the second one is boot floppy emulation with cdrom-image, so, we change the order and that's it. The only problem is that cdrom-image doesn't have any help, so it just echoes the prompt of syslinux and that's it. I believe that if you want to change the cd ordering or even have the same ordering in the full cd set, but have boot-floppy emulation booting in the netinst/businesscard cds, you just have to add the help screens to cdrom-image syslinux and when images with that config are build, you tell me and I make the changes and the new images, that's it. Right, we'll want to add help screens to syslinux for all of our images in any case. I think I understand now, isolinux uses its own help screens which it reads from the CD, and these come from debian-cd (for now..), but we can control the rest of them. I don't particularly want to make the decision about which CD has isolinux on it and which uses the old method. I do want to get the help texts straightened out and preferably in one place, and I do want to have a netinst CD without isolinux on it. Anything you guys decide that accomplishes that is 100% fine with me, you are the ones who know all about isolinux. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote: We are using these features, current isolinux setup allows the user to select to boot the net initrd or the cdrom initrd. I don't know if this is wanted, this must be decided by the debian-installer guys, if we want to offer just the posibility to boot the cdrom image we can just boot cdrom.img I don't see any advantages with d-i of having a net initrd and a cdrom initrd both on the cdrom. Our existing cdrom initrds can be used for net installs too after loading a few components from the cdrom. The downside I see is that this would not let us have a rescue initrd, and the cdrom initrd is not ideal for a rescue cd. I have just tried it and it works, even though the setup for syslinux should be changed a bit to include the help screens and all that, this should be done in debian-installer, as it is d-i who makes that image. There are several advantages to having the syslinux help be part of d-i, including letting us reuse the same material for syslinux help on the boot floppy. What would be a good way for us to distribute the help texts so debian-cd could use them on the d-i cdroms? Maybe we could put isolinux on the *second* CD, with eventually an initrd that supports SCSI cdroms. That sounds fine with me if it is ok to drop the net initrd from the booting options of the cds. Well, I don't know what else to say, in the full cd set we really can have different booting methods, one on each cd, the important thing is to decide what do we put on the netinst/bussinesscard cds and also how do we order the methods in the full cd set. I think that the main problem from the d-i team's perspective is that all the daily cds and the cds for beta 1 use isolinux. So when users come to us who cannot boot from isolinux, we have no alternative except boot floppies or the monthly full cd builds. Any approach that provides at least one netinst cd without isolinux on it would be a help to this situation. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Umm, seems like we go again for the same discusion, ok, I've been gathering some old links to try to shorten this. The isolinux / multiboot / boot floppy emulation (syslinux) decision was already discussed for woody, at that time I was building unofficial images for all woody's arches, and I also partitipated on this discusion, I dislike isolinux because of the problems they give in old machines, but I also see its good side letting us have bigger and different initrds and kernels. At woody we felt like we should give different flavours of kernels and thus we needed some kind of multiboot on our cds, then Raphael Hertzog asked us to create cds of the two methods available to achieve this, this is his mail: http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2002/debian-cd-200204/msg00060.html So, both multiboot and isolinux images were created and made available for testing, which Raphael asked for in this mail: http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2002/debian-cd-200204/msg00121.html After testing isolinux images we found several problems, I descrived them on this mail: http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2002/debian-cd-200205/msg00097.html several other people also found problems and reported them, it seemed that some old BIOS would have problems with isolinux boots, however in the thread started by the message in the url I have just refered, you can read this in one of the replies from H. Peter Anvin, the author of syslinux/isolinux: It appears that really old BIOSes work like crap for anything but floppy emulation; some contemporary BIOSes like crap for anything but no emulation. This seems to follow what the current Micro$oft OSes use, i.e. again -- the BIOS vendors test does it boot M$, ok then. Well, if I were a BIOS maker I would try to follow microsoft new OS, but not loose the compatibility with MS older OSes, or put it our way, I would be giving support for isolinux, but not loosing support for the old el-torito floppy emulation cds or even the multiboot el-torito floppy emulation cds. Anyway, as we wanted several flavours on our first cd and multiboot floppy emulated cds didn't have the posibility of a menu with a description in the options, we went for the isolinux booting in the first cd, and as I didn't much like the falures we were seing, I made some changes to isolinux so that it would output a message saying that in case of failure the user should try cds from 2-5 as these were the normal el-torito floppy emulated cds and thus compatible with older bios, the message on which I explained all this was: http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2002/debian-cd-200205/msg00185.html So... now we are getting our Sarge cds ready... great! and now I'm making the official testing images... grea... ehem... well, the thing is that I'm not the one taking the decision on what boot method we'll be using, so don't come to me in the irc saying that I can do whatever I want with the cds, in fact, every change in the cds that is not a trivial one or something like that, should be discussed in the debian-cd and/or debian-boot lists, thanks! That said and now that we have a view of the problem we can talk about the changes for sarge... We are not using the old 1.67 isolinux custom image I had made for woody, Raphael has commited 1.75 version of isolinux to be used with sarge, but isolinux is on version 2.04 now, and it has a debug version, so we could try to make cds with this version to test them and see if we improve something before taking a decision :-? I really believe nothing is going to change, but who knows, also maybe H. Peter Anvin could be contacted just in case there is some other method we are forgetting about :-??? it seems that we are locking out people from testing by using isolinux on our netinst/businesscard CDs, see #220139 and #220139. Since we do not need any of isolinux's features I propose to use syslinux on the CDs. We are using these features, current isolinux setup allows the user to select to boot the net initrd or the cdrom initrd. I don't know if this is wanted, this must be decided by the debian-installer guys, if we want to offer just the posibility to boot the cdrom image we can just boot cdrom.img, I have just tried it and it works, even though the setup for syslinux should be changed a bit to include the help screens and all that, this should be done in debian-installer, as it is d-i who makes that image. Maybe we could put isolinux on the *second* CD, with eventually an initrd that supports SCSI cdroms. That sounds fine with me if it is ok to drop the net initrd from the booting options of the cds. Well, I don't know what else to say, in the full cd set we really can have different booting methods, one on each cd, the important thing is to decide what do we put on the netinst/bussinesscard cds and also how do we order the methods in the full cd set. If something I said needs farther explanation (I know my english sucks) just ask for it. Regards... -- Manty/BestiaTester -
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Santiago Garcia Mantinan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Umm, seems like we go again for the same discusion, ok, I've been gathering some old links to try to shorten this. The isolinux / multiboot / boot floppy emulation (syslinux) decision was already discussed for woody, at that time I was building unofficial images for all woody's arches, and I also partitipated on this discusion, I dislike isolinux because of the problems they give in old machines, but I also see its good side letting us have bigger and different initrds and kernels. But we don't have that for the netinstall and businesscard CDs. it seems that we are locking out people from testing by using isolinux on our netinst/businesscard CDs, see #220139 and #220139. Since we do not need any of isolinux's features I propose to use syslinux on the CDs. We are using these features, current isolinux setup allows the user to select to boot the net initrd or the cdrom initrd. I don't know if this is wanted, this must be decided by the debian-installer guys, if we want to offer just the posibility to boot the cdrom image we can just boot cdrom.img, I have just tried it and it works, even though the setup for syslinux should be changed a bit to include the help screens and all that, this should be done in debian-installer, as it is d-i who makes that image. I've been working on the new build scripts for d-i to build more functional images directly. They generate 3 different CD images each suited specifically to one task and one task only: 5MB bootcd - just boots but is like netboot or floppy boot in all other respects 20MB d-i cd - image with tons of udebs to get your network up and running and disk partitions so you can install base over net. 60MB base cd - image with udebs and all the debs needed to install base. Everything needed till the first reboot (and a little more e.g. for dsl). You have a fully functional Debian without any net access but nothing in the way of apps. Given those three types its a bit pointless to have multiple initrds on the cdrom. People who want less than is on the cdrom should have downloaded the smaller cd in the first place. I know the beta1 scripts don't build a pure bootcd image but thats coming now that beta1 is out. In cases were you end up with an old cd and would like to not use the outdated (u)debs on the cdrom I say tough luck. People should live with the old udebs or rsync a fresh image. Its only 5 or 20MB. Not supporting a lot of older hardware just to be able to choose a different behaviour not intended by the cd is not worth it. Maybe we could put isolinux on the *second* CD, with eventually an initrd that supports SCSI cdroms. That sounds fine with me if it is ok to drop the net initrd from the booting options of the cds. What second cd? Only the full set has multiple cds. For a cd with isolinux we should probably build a huge initrd with all the ide/scsi/cd modules preinstalled. We are not bound by the 2.88MB limit there, right? Well, I don't know what else to say, in the full cd set we really can have different booting methods, one on each cd, the important thing is to decide what do we put on the netinst/bussinesscard cds and also how do we order the methods in the full cd set. If something I said needs farther explanation (I know my english sucks) just ask for it. As a conclusion: My opinion is that the boot/netinst/bussinesscard images are small enough to force people to download the right one in favour of supporting all cdrom bootable i386 hardware. That means a 2.88MB floppy image with syslinux. For the full set smae as with previous releases: cd 1 multiboot and cd 2 - X different single boot flavours. MfG Goswin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Hello, it seems that we are locking out people from testing by using isolinux on our netinst/businesscard CDs, see #220139 and #220139. Since we do not need any of isolinux's features I propose to use syslinux on the CDs. Regards, Sebastian -- PGP-Key: http://www.mmweg.rwth-aachen.de/~sebastian.ley/public.key Fingerprint: A46A 753F AEDC 2C01 BE6E F6DB 97E0 3309 9FD6 E3E6 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Usage of isolinux on the beta CDs
Sebastian Ley wrote: it seems that we are locking out people from testing by using isolinux on our netinst/businesscard CDs, see #220139 and #220139. Since we do not need any of isolinux's features I propose to use syslinux on the CDs. I think I agree. The only thing isolinux has the potential to buy us at the moment is a large enough boot initrd to support SCSI cdroms without using a driver floppy, and SCSI cdroms are rare, and we are not even currently using that potential. We also have space to include 5 or 10 of the most common SCSI controllers on the current initrd if we really want to (519k free). Maybe we could put isolinux on the *second* CD, with eventually an initrd that supports SCSI cdroms. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
