> > Well, I've hit the first major issue with making a floppy boot disk.
> Take
> > color.gz and make the exact same thing on the Alpha and it's too big to
> > fit on a single floppy. The uncompressed size is over 5 megs, and the
> > gzip -9'ed image is 2 megs.
>
> How about using bzip2 instead of gzip?
After inspecting /usr/src/linux/drivers/block/rd.c, it would appear that
we don't support bzipped ramdisks. That seems goofy, since we support
bzipped kernel images. So bzipping the image is out.
However, there is another solution. Ramdisks can span multiple disks,
and the kernel will prompt you for each one. If you've ever downloaded
color.gz using Netscape and wondered why it asks you for the next disk,
you know what I'm talking about.
So, I could break the 2 meg image up into two floppies worth. I know
it seems like a big hack, but that may be the only way to go for
people who need to boot off floppy. For people with cd drives, the
full image would be on the CD in one piece.
> Well, color.gz for intel has both fdisk and cfdisk. How about dumping the
> largest one...
fdisk is only about 130k. I need to trim out a lot more than that to get
it down to 1.44 megs. If I could get rid of some of the 2.4 megs of
libraries, that would really help.
So now the question is: can everyone cope with using 6 megs of ram to
store an uncompressed root filesystem in? I don't know how much smaller
it can get.
--
Chris Lumens - chris@slackware.com - KG6CIH
@n=(-42,-85,-83,-19,65,2,-10,-10,-15,-3,2,-10,73,-4,8,-4,2,79,8,17,15,7,14,2);
print map{chr(-$n[$i++]+ord)} sort(split(//,'place random string here')),"\n";
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