freebsd install from floppy

[Piotr Lukawski]

In many situations, especially for and old or non standard equipment
floppies are the best or even the only solution.
Actually if I haven't found the solution to use floppy to install FreeBSD, I
would be forced to use another system eg. OpenBSD instead, even if I prefer
FreeBSD.
The decision to make floppies obsolete is very bad, because it is still
needed by many people.

On 6 March 2010 10:54, Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>wrote:

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> On 06/03/2010 09:26:22, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > I seem to remember something about the floppy images being dropped
> > because few current (or even recent) systems have a floppy drive at
> > all, much less a bootable one.
>
> Yeah, but the floppy disk drive was already obsolete 10 years ago.  It's
> just taken this long for it to fall down dead.  Good riddance to it.
> Why would anyone want an unreliable, slow and tiny capacity device when
> you can get GiB capacity USB sticks everywhere nowadays?
>
> Not providing floppy disk installation images doesn't imply dropping
> kernel support for floppy drives.  My ancient system has a floppy, and
> if I blew the dust out of it and could find some media it should work
> just fine with FreeBSD 8.0.
>
> In fact, if you need to support older equipment, free OSes like FreeBSD
> are really your only choice.  Drivers for old devices tend to stick
> around in the source tree for much longer than in any commercial
> offering.  They might suffer from bit-rot due to lack of developer
> access to samples of kit, but if you really need something like that
> fixed you probably could get patches.  In fact, I think the primary
> reason for dropping old device drivers is usually because they don't
> receive any attention during the occasional code refactoring that
> occurs: no one complains, and the device sits around unusable or needing
> special backwards compatibility shims for a while, then gets quietly
> deleted.
>
>
>
>
> - --
> Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
>                                                  Flat 3
> PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
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