Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:54:38 +0000 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: perryh@pluto.rain.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org, plukawski@gmail.com Subject: Re: freebsd install from floppy Message-ID: <4B92265E.5030109@infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <4b921fbe.rSW1F2xbdHLIg6/X%perryh@pluto.rain.com> References: <c1c87c5a1003030433g43d2bc3ak3cda4822eb4b2cbd@mail.gmail.com> <d7195cff1003032051ub0bc72fi6c91164b26af08b3@mail.gmail.com> <c1c87c5a1003051051v65a39c53jd80b2095ceb7c246@mail.gmail.com> <4b921fbe.rSW1F2xbdHLIg6/X%perryh@pluto.rain.com>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 06/03/2010 09:26:22, perryh@pluto.rain.com wrote: > I seem to remember something about the floppy images being dropped > because few current (or even recent) systems have a floppy drive at > all, much less a bootable one. Yeah, but the floppy disk drive was already obsolete 10 years ago. It's just taken this long for it to fall down dead. Good riddance to it. Why would anyone want an unreliable, slow and tiny capacity device when you can get GiB capacity USB sticks everywhere nowadays? Not providing floppy disk installation images doesn't imply dropping kernel support for floppy drives. My ancient system has a floppy, and if I blew the dust out of it and could find some media it should work just fine with FreeBSD 8.0. In fact, if you need to support older equipment, free OSes like FreeBSD are really your only choice. Drivers for old devices tend to stick around in the source tree for much longer than in any commercial offering. They might suffer from bit-rot due to lack of developer access to samples of kit, but if you really need something like that fixed you probably could get patches. In fact, I think the primary reason for dropping old device drivers is usually because they don't receive any attention during the occasional code refactoring that occurs: no one complains, and the device sits around unusable or needing special backwards compatibility shims for a while, then gets quietly deleted. - -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.14 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkuSJl4ACgkQ8Mjk52CukIxSWACfSkJ6k09ig0sR5lctO7tooF1k NnUAnRrWUeDMssvWDx7rvzMgPWb3fHSw =3zRd -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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