Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Avleen Vig]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 01:22:38PM +0100, Martin Nilsson wrote:
> Are you aware that the FreeBSD CD:s (both 4.9 & 5.2) are not bootable on 
> a CD-ROM connected via USB? Both try to boot but hangs somewhere in the 
> loader. This is on our P4 Supermicro serverboards. As usual Win2K, 2K3 & 
> RedHat just works. An external USB2.0 connected Asus CD-RW drive 
> (52x/24x/52x) with power supply costs about $70 so this is really 
> nothing expensive or fancy today.

Please do not assume that because it costs $70 it is universally
availible.
There are a lot of people who cannot afford this:
 the unemployed
 school children
 retired persons (sometimes)
 people with families to support :)

Unfortuantely I feel this does need to be taken in to account here.
While I totally empathise with Scott's problem and the lack of time to
do things the way we have been, we need to appreciate that telling
everyone to burn a CD to install FreeBSD (thus incur costs if you don't
have a CD burner, and wouldn't need one if not to install FreeBSD) is
not far from the "You must pay us to buy this on CD" approach (openbsd)