7.3-BETA1 Available... [memstick.img?]

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Ian Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>  > On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Ken Smith wrote:
>  > > No, no plans afoot for memsticks for the balance of the 7.X
>  > > releases. The sysinstall support for installing from a USB based
>  > > disk didn't get MFCed to stable/7.  Even if it was we're already
>  > > something of a heavyweight on images (both CDs-with-packages and
>  > > DVD) so my plan all along had been to phase in the memstick
>  > > image for stable/8 and at the same time drop CDs-with-packages.
>  >
>  > FWIW the method I used works on 7.x because sysinstall understands
>  > how to read the install off a DOS device :)
>
> Still to figure out how your method - using Luigi's syslinux boot off
> a FAT slice on a stick - works when 7's sysinstall can't see USB
> disks?

7 _can_ see USB disks just fine, it has nothing to do with the USB 
stack.

The problem was purely that sysinstall did not look at certain 
candidates for source media due to some old assumptions in the code. 
The patches in 8.x  to allow it to install "from USB" just changed it 
to look harder for UFS source media.

IMO FAT32 is more flexible anyway since 99.9% of all USB sticks already 
come formatted using it, and 99.9% of all computers with USB ports can 
read and write it.

FWIW there is a tool that is shipped with some Linux distros which can 
take a CD/DVD image and munge it onto a USB stick. Unfortunately it 
doesn't work on FreeBSD because I can't get the loader to read from the 
USB stick directly which means I need to make an MFS for sysinstall 
which contains the loader, kernel and sysinstall MFS. If such an image 
were shipped as part of the build then this tool could be used by end 
users to convert the ISO image themselves.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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