boot floppies and syslinux "-s" mode
As you may know, our current boot floppy for i386 uses syslinux as its
bootloader. It uses syslinux "safe, slow and stupid" mode to be able to
boot in machines with weird BIOSes. The problem is that mode is painfully
slow (I've received reports of ~4 minutes to boot in several machines,
including some new Pentium II!).
As CDs are a lot faster than floppies, it's OK to use "-s" for the boot
image on the official CDs, but I'm thinking about going back to the normal
mode for the floppy images, and adding a README file giving instructions
for replacing syslinux on the rescue floppy to build a "-s" floppy, just
in case the user has one of the machines that don't like the normal mode.
(It as simple as inserting the floppy on the drive and running
"syslinux -s /dev/fd0" as root). That information may be added to the
install docs instead/also.
As there's a minor problem in the current boot-flopies set (dselect adds
some packages to the ones selected using "profiles", sometimes leading
to conflicts), we probably need another boot-floppies release one way or
the other.
Comments?
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: