In article <200506272249.39725.junyoung@netbsd.org> you write:
> I'm strongly skeptical that there are users remaining who want to use
> floppies rather than CD-ROMs for installation on those ports (most
> i386/amd64 machines here in Korea are even shipped without floppy drives).
> CD-ROM drives are very cheap these days (~$12 vs. ~$5 floppy drives) and
> I can't find a machine without a CD-ROM drive anywhere.

I just built a server with a floppy and no cdrom drive. I have no need
for cdrom on that machine, bios upgrade requires a dos boot floppy, and
floppy drives are still cheaper and also happened to be convenient in
terms of available external bays.

This a is a brand-new x86_64-capable p4 system, BTW.

My desktop at work, a not-too-old (but crappy low-end) Dell, came with
both floppy and cd-rom, but the cd-rom drive doesn't work with netbsd.

I seem to do floppy installs much more often than cd-rom installs.  One
reason: looking around the office, I see ~every machine with a drive
capable of not only booting, but *creating* floppy install media.  I
don't know which ones have cd writers.  Also, software to write floppy
install media comes included with netbsd (dd) and is trivial to obtain
(as in, we provide it in a directory next to the distribution) for
dos/windows. 

So from where I sit, floppy installation is still more ubiquitous and
less likely to involve advance planning or tracking down who has the
burner and blanks in an organization.

I have no love of floppies, and having to switch disks partway through
the install, and not being able to grab a snapshot with new a feature or
bug fix I need because the floppies overflowed weeks ago and nobody has
figured out what to trim yet, etc.  But IMHO, floppies are still more
universal.  As you know, they still sell floppy drives in computer
shopps -- and places like CompUSA are loathe to stock anyhing old or
that won't sell in volume. 

Now, I think it would be a great thing to improve the cdrom boot process
and stop using floppy emulation for that, but I think floppy install
needs to stay a first class citizen for a while longer. 

Ty