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

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 07:36:10AM -0800 I heard the voice of
Avleen Vig, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> If I understand you right..
> A floppy boot, which loads the absolutely basic stuff (network drivers,
> and some easy way to config the network) and then goes and grabs the
> installer would otherwise be on the current floppies and "boots" it?

Many (most?) Linux dists do this for floppy installs.  I've come around
to thinking it a better and better idea lately.  It makes it easy to have
much more bloa... er, "featureful" installers, particularly more
graphical ones, since you're no longer limited by the size of a floppy.
And even cheap DSL is faster than a floppy drive for loading it, to boot
(no pun ;).  And you can even provide for loading it off a local CD, if
you have a CD drive you can't boot from.

The downside is that writing such a beast is a lot more work...


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/

"The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I
      haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"