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

[William Grim]

Wes Peters wrote:

>On Friday 09 January 2004 09:34 pm, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Michel TALON wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Sincerely FreeBSD developers have more important tasks than spending
>>>hours to fit an installable system on floppies. When FreeBSD used
>>>one floppy, it was tolerable to do floppy installs. With 2 or 3
>>>floppies it is awfully slow, i have done once and will never do it
>>>again.
>>>      
>>>
>>I still use floppies to do my installs, and find getting the base
>>system up over FTP to generally take <30minutes *shrug*  Faster, IMHO,
>>then downloading the ISO and burning it to a CD ..
>>    
>>
>
>Faster than loading a single ISO image with only the boot information and 
>sysinstall and booting from that, rather than 3 (or 4 or 5) floppies?  A 
>CD-R is cheaper, faster, more reliable, and you don't have to keep 
>feeding them into the machine.
>
>  
>
Yes, and what about my P3-500 server that has no CD drive in it?  I 
hardly think I'm going to purchase a CD drive just for that server.

If there ever comes a time when I have to decide between purchasing a CD 
drive to reinstall a broken installation of FBSD that I have deemed 
unrecoverable or using linux (where I can use floppies all day and 
night), I'll be installing linux.

However, on this note, I would like to say I'd like to help out with a 
floppy project, but I would not want to be "floppy maintainer."  At 
least, not until I knew a lot more about how things worked, and even 
then, I'm not sure, because of time and lack of several test systems.

Later!

-- 
William Michael Grim
Student, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Unix Network Administrator, SIUE, Computer Science dept.
Phone: (217) 341-6552
Email: wgrim at siue.edu