I've been experimenting with bootable floppies on the SPARC platform.
They don't seem impossible to work with, but a pain nonetheless simply
because they are floppies.
I think I can offer floppy booting as an option for sun4c users should the
CD-ROM not be a solution (since sun4c systems didn't ship with CD-ROM
drives as standard equipment) or the network booting fail (which seems to
be quite common on the sun4c platform). The problems associated with this
are:
(a) There would have to be three floppies and not just two. A boot
disk, a root disk, and the second root disk. The Alpha platform
has to do this as well, it's just annoying.
(b) I would only be able to support the sun4c platform. I would strip
the kernel down to sun4c-only stuff and build it accordingly. I
could possibly see supporting sun4m in the future, but only if a
lot of people request that.
(c) The distribution would still need to come from some other source,
like NFS or a CD. It's simply too large to split out over
floppies.
So does anyone really care about those "limitations"? If not, I'll get
some floppies made for the sun4c platform so that those users will have
another option for booting and installing.
--
David Cantrell | david@slackware.com
KG6CII | Slackware Linux Project
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 19 2002 - 11:00:03 PDT