Floppies for ALPHA
Scott Long
scottl at freebsd.org
Tue Jul 29 12:34:49 PDT 2003
Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> 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,
This idea has intrigued me for a while. Feel free to prototype
something!
Scott
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