floppy.. Was: Drawing graphics on terminal

[Juli Mallett]

* "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd at over-yonder.net> [ 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: jmallett at freebsd.org; efnet: juli;