Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 17:37:24 +0100 From: Michel TALON <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <20040108163724.GA26745@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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> And, further, some of us don't have (and don't want) CD burners, and even > if we had 'em, don't want to burn (no pun intended ;) a CD blank just to > install an OS, when we can just (re-)use 2 floppies and do it across the > LAN from a local FTP mirror, which is as fast as a CD drive anyway. Sincerely FreeBSD developers have more important tasks than spending hours to fit an installable system on floppies. When FreeBSD used one floppy, it was tolerable to do floppy installs. With 2 or 3 floppies it is awfully slow, i have done once and will never do it again. There are so many workarounds for people who don't have a CD burner, including asking a friend to burn the CD, buying a cheap CD somewhere. For people who don't have a CD reader able to boot, the simplest solution by far is to remove the hard drive and install it on another machine, much faster than reading the 2 damned floppies :-) The technically dedicated people can also arrange a PXE boot which boots a live system, and then brutally install on hard disk bypassing the installer which is far from nice anyways. There are tons of ways of proceeding, including dd copying a series of identical disks for people who have to do large installs. By the way, what's the reason that it is impossible to have just one floppy which boots FreeBSD kernel, allows to see an unbootable cdrom and continue installation from here? During the holidays i have installed the Linux Knoppix distro this way on an old machine which doesn't allow to boot from CD. There is a 1.44M floppy image on the CD which allows to do just that. I am quite stunned that the same thing cannot be done for FreeBSD. -- Michel TALON
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