Floppies for ALPHA

[Wilko Bulte]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 10:19:17PM +0300, 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,

5 MB is quite small for Alpha I think. 

> 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.

Hm, yes. OK.

> 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.

I think people would like that yes. 

-- 
|   / o / /_  _   		wkb at freebie.xs4all.nl
|/|/ / / /(  (_)  Bulte