Floppies for ALPHA

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 09:02:39AM +0200, Wilko Bulte wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 04:16:19PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
[...]
> > Is there an alternative for those in remote areas that can neither
> > download the miniiso nor buy the cd set?  Every time that we talk about
> > downloading iso's, the issue comes up of those in eastern-bloc and
> > asian countries that have little bandwidth.  Can Alpha do a 'boot-only'
> > cd image that is <5MB?
> 
> Maybe. But you would need a lot of other stuff to make it useful as
> an installed system so why would the size of the boot'kit' be so important?
> I mean, you need the rest of the bits downloaded anyway to get a useful
> installation.
> 
This is not the point IMO.  The point is to have the miniboot.iso
that could be used to replace a floppy, something less than 5MB,
with only kernel and MFS root on it (resembling the contents of
the "big" boot.flp floppy).  Everything else would have to be
downloaded from the net (e.g., FTP), but that would not cost you
236MB like it's currently for the miniinst.iso for 5.1/Alpha --
the "base" distribution on FTP is only 47MB.

If there's some interest, I could add the support for generating
miniboot.iso to release/Makefile.  This would be extremely
useful for other platforms too, including i386.  Just let me
know if there's a strong interest in this.


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov		Sysadmin and DBA,
ru at sunbay.com		Sunbay Software Ltd,
ru at FreeBSD.org		FreeBSD committer
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