Re: The Kernel (fwd)

[Rick Jones <rickya@siservices.net>]

George Bonser wrote:
> 
<snipped>

You can use initrd to boot off of a CDROM without a floppy at all.  All
you need is loadlin <CDROM/vmlinuz> initrd=<cdrom/initrd>, or there
about, and off she goes.

PPP is one thing that should absolutely be compiled into the kernel. 
I've lost modules in the past when I compiled everything as modules.  It
was back when bo was unstable and there was that problem with the
modutils dep's.  I lost the ability to load modules and had to reinstall
from the base disks to get ppp back so I could reconnect to fix things.

So we need to keep in mind that shite happens and there needs to be a
pre-compiled recovery system.  I think a recovery partition might be
benificial, or not, we need to look at the pro's and con's.  It would
consist of nothing more than Linux core and maybe a couple of utilities
to aid in recovery situations, so it would only be a few meg. 
Considering the average hard drive is a few gig these days, the space
used for a recovery partition wouldn't be missed.

That leads into the issue of making lilo a default part of the distro
setup, which may frighten some folks.  I suppose that some batch files
could be placed in c:\ with different boot modes.  But if they loose
those they'll have to fall back on a disk that they'll probably either
loose or forget about and use for something else, or whatever.

We should get these issues resolved before we are half done with the
install disks and decide to change things.