On Mon, 8 May 2006, Garrett D'Amore wrote:

> Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>>
>> I propose removing "bad144" from the i386 installation media.
>>
>> I find that "bootfloppy" and "bootfloppy-com" *just* *fit* into
>> 2880 KB with 0K padding, after commenting out "bad144" from
>> "ramdisk-big/list". Does anyone have a better idea? Would anyone
>> really miss "bad144"?  Is that even enough, or will it just fill
>> up again in a day or two?
>
>
> Hmm... it strikes me that we are fighting a never ending battle with the
> 1.44 media.  Maybe its time to rethink this?

Sure, every time this happens...

The floppies, as such, aren't really the issue, since we could just 
make three, or five...

> Don't like ~99% just use network or CDROMs as the way they install now?
> Is it worth spending a huge amount of effort to try to make things
> slightly easier for that last 1%?

The CDROMs -- likely the most popular install media -- are the 
problem. The El Torrito emulation section must be no more than 
2880kb, and that's what's overfilling now (ramdisk-big).

It's been suggested that we forego the emulation, but older BIOS's 
likely won't be able to deal with that.  I think the idea was to have 
a small El Torrito section with just a bootloader, to load a kernel 
out of the ISO image. Does the current bootloader support that? 
(Don't answer that. I just built a current CDROM -- I'll try to load 
one of the compressed kernels right now.)


Frederick