On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 11:31:03AM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote: > To "download", you first have to get root mounted. And the source, of > course. This may be a NIC (any type!) or a harddisk with a filesystem.
I presume you mean the target root? It's already mounted by the time the driver disks are installed. Of course, you can also download to a Ramdisk. By download, I mean from a Debian archive (i.e., mirror). > > I think the most common modules needed to get the system up and running > > would even fit into root.bin (at least for 1.44MB floppies). Imagine, > > zero driver disks for most common configurations ... > > Please count the needed space and wake up soon. The only drivers I would > drop from the floppy disks are all the multimedia devices. I don't think so. Consider this. Currently, all the required drivers are compiled into the kernel. But suppose we have a stripped-down kernel with networking, tmpfs and as many common NIC drivers as will fit compiled-in, but basically everything else non-essential (SCSI, IDE, RAID, fat) as modules. On the initrd, linuxrc configures the network and downloads a larger ramdisk image (e.g., from a Debian archive) into a ramdisk, load any modules the installer wants, changes root and runs dbootstrap. It might even be possible to fit it onto a single floppy (obviating gzip and tar on the initrd and the floppy driver compiled into the kernel). I'm not being starry-eyed here; I actually used a custom rescue disk to configure a Megaraid SCSI controller with busted firmware, set up LVM, bring up the network and download the rest I needed to install Potato. Regards, Mark. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
