Re: floppy.. Was: Drawing graphics on terminal
* Matthew D. Fuller [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ Date: 2003-06-16 ] [ w.r.t. Re: floppy.. Was: Drawing graphics on terminal ] On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 03:43:59PM -0400 I heard the voice of Leo Bicknell, and lo! it spake thus: Another idea is to make a floppy just smart enough to load the installer over the network, since PC's generally have more memory these days... Many Linux dists seem to do something like this nowadays. Then you also only need enough drivers for the NIC; not even the floppy/CD, since you read that through the BIOS up until you've downloaded the installer and modules. It's got its downsides, to be sure, but it also has some positives. Not to turn this into too much of a bikeshed, but here's an idea I jotted down a while ago: %%% There has been a lot of talk about deprecation of floppies in upcoming releases, and I've been thinking a lot about whether or not we need to do this, and I've been thinking especially about when it makes sense to have the installer at all, and have come up with three cases, and how a floppy would fit in to them. This is intended to help come up with ways of having single-purpose floppies that are easier to keep small enough to fit on, well, floppies. 1) Network install. The floppy could include only network (and requisite) drivers, such that mass storage drivers could be pulled over the net at an early stage in the install. Ideally we would work from the information we gather about driverless devices to figure out what drivers may be appropriate, but letting the user select would be a must, as would possibly trying everything, with a suitable warning that drivers may be quite large. 2) CD-ROM install. The CD-ROM should be used for booting, or a floppy similar to that in case 3. should be used. 3) Install from other physical medium. No network drivers. Just storage (and requisite) driers of every common colour at the very least. Driver floppies could be available for the more bloated. No reason a user cannot run sysinstall after the system is installed to set up the network parameters they want, if they don't need them for the bootstrap install. This should probably not have netinet, etc., either. The idea is that people using floppies should be using them to get what they need up and running to install the base system, and that real configuration of all available hardware should be done once the kernel they will be running said configuration on is there. %%% I think I may have come up with some edge cases since then that I never wrote down, but I doubt they mattered much. Thanx, juli. -- juli mallett. email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; efnet: juli; ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: floppy.. Was: Drawing graphics on terminal
On 16 Jun, Juli Mallett wrote: Not to turn this into too much of a bikeshed, but here's an idea I jotted down a while ago: %%% There has been a lot of talk about deprecation of floppies in upcoming releases, and I've been thinking a lot about whether or not we need to do this, and I've been thinking especially about when it makes sense to have the installer at all, and have come up with three cases, and how a floppy would fit in to them. This is intended to help come up with ways of having single-purpose floppies that are easier to keep small enough to fit on, well, floppies. I've thought for a long time that this is the best way to go. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: floppy.. Was: Drawing graphics on terminal
On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:38:06 -0500 Juli Mallett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1) Network install. The floppy could include only network (and requisite) drivers, such that mass storage drivers could be pulled over the net at an early stage in the install. Ideally we would work from the information we gather about driverless devices to figure out what drivers may be appropriate, but letting the user select would be a must, as would possibly trying everything, with a suitable warning that drivers may be quite large. 2) CD-ROM install. The CD-ROM should be used for booting, or a floppy similar to that in case 3. should be used. 3) Install from other physical medium. No network drivers. Just storage (and requisite) driers of every common colour at the very least. Driver floppies could be available for the more bloated. No reason a user cannot run sysinstall after the system is installed to set up the network parameters they want, if they don't need them for the bootstrap install. This should probably not have netinet, etc., I like these ideas. The one other thing I could imagine being useful would be a consoleless install via Ethernet. That could be managed though by having the network KLD's on the CD-ROM, since there wouldn't be a shortage of space. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: floppy.. Was: Drawing graphics on terminal
On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Leo Bicknell wrote: Some of this could be done in the current installer, if there wasn't an effort to make it still fit on a floppy. Mind you, I'd like to see the floppy based install stick around for a while, but I think FreeBSD needs to embrace the CD reality. We have over a thousand machines in teh field with no CD but they do have floppies.. we use the floppy when we upgrade.. It's still are requirement as far as I'm concerened :-) ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
