Re: SEUL: hardware detection

[William T Wilson <fluffy@dunadan.com>]

On 18 Jan 1998 john@dhh.gt.org wrote:

> 1) Space.  The Linux kernel leaves little room on a floppy for anything
>    else.

My kernels usually run about 400K.  And that's for a medium-sized
monolithic kernel.  Besides, the user will be loading a CD or an NFS mount
anyway (those who suggest we make the distribution floppy-installable are
catering to a market that would probably rather use Suckware, er,
Slackware anyway).

> 2) Rawrite. A FreeDOS based install would not require perfect floppies and
>    could be put on a formatted floppy with ordinary tools.

I don't know why you are worried about 'perfect' floppies.  I think it is
reasonable to assume that the user will have floppies without errors on
them.  If they can't even get error-free floppies they will never manage
to successfully run linux no matter how simple we make it.  Besides, I
never found rawrite difficult to use.

Redhat uses a loadlin-based bootfloppy on a FAT FS already.  I don't know
why they do this, but they do, it shows it works.  But they make you load
it with rawrite anyway.

As long as we are going to have to write our own disk defragger anyway, we
have little reason to fuss with DOS at all.  But if we are to run Windows
based programs to "prepare" a DOS based system for use, then we will not
need boot floppies at all.