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

[Avleen Vig]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 10:57:56PM +0100, Martin Nilsson wrote:
> This discussion is just like when the i386 support was removed from the 
> GENERIC kernel, a lot of noise about old systems that wouldn't be able 
> to run (or benefit) from FreeBSD 5 anyway.

No, this is nothing like that.

> >>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.
> 
> I fail to see the difference in required labour between creating two 
> floppies or a CD-R/RW disc. Most new machines ship with CD-RW drives 
> today, the only boxes that can't boot from a CD are early Pentium1 class 
> and frankly why run 5.x or 6.x on those?

Incorrect. I and others have already given several examples of how
modern machines cannot boot from CD for all the various reasons given.
If the freebsd hosting mirrors don't mind us NFS mounting their servers
to get the boot image, etherboot would be by far the simplest solution
to maintain in the long run - then we can go with Scott's approach of
getting rid of the current floppies, and adding in the other suggested
approach of downloading the boot img from a remote server and "running"
it. (I believe etherboot can be used like this, please someone correct
me if i'm wrong).