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

[Peter Jeremy]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 10:52:08AM +0100, Daniel Lang wrote:
>Matthew D. Fuller wrote on Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 01:58:11AM -0600:
>[..]
>> 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.
>
>That's no point, as you can use a CD-RW, so no media is wasted.

Not all CD readers will read CD-RW's (I have one that won't).  And
this doesn't solve the problem of not having a CD burner or installing
onto a system that either doesn't have a CD drive or won't boot off
one (I have systems in both categories).

>On the other hand, I guess such systems are able to boot over
>the network. I'd love to see a integrated boot and installation
>procedure that utilizes PXE (or any other network boot method)
>and advocates it. (In this regard I just love Suns).

Keep in mind that older systems probably won't boot over the network
without a netboot ROM or similar.  The netboot ROM images are (or
were) in the distribution but aren't much use without an EPROM burner.

Peter