Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Scott Long]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 11:50:59PM -0800 I heard the voice of
> Avleen Vig, and lo! it spake thus:
> >
> > While it is indeed true that most machines since 1997 will support this
> > CD format, please take in to account:
>
> And, further, some of us don't have (and don't want) CD burners, and even
> if we had 'em, don't want to burn (no pun intended ;) a CD blank just to
> install an OS, when we can just (re-)use 2 floppies and do it across the
> LAN from a local FTP mirror, which is as fast as a CD drive anyway.

Well, using the emulated boot cd would only be about 3MB and would only
contain the sysinstall environment, so you'd still be installing over the
LAN or whatever.  As someone else pointed out, it is apparently possible
to use Compact Flash as the media instead of a CD, so that is something to
consider also.

>
> It seems to me that we could split more out into modules, and/or add more
> disks of modules (maybe categorize a "storage device" modules disk, a
> "network drivers" modules disk, etc, keeping just the more common devices
> in the main kernel).  Last I saw, the current system only created a
> single modules disk, which was a godsend to a kernel overflowing one
> disk, but as we add more and more stuff becomes another, albeit larger,
> noose.
>

For 5.x we already have a 3rd floppy that is dedicated to modules.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work nearly as well as it should because there
is no way to activate it during the boot sequence; it can only be used
once sysinstall is running.  Also, it too is nearly overflowing.

Scott