On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:51, Ken Gentle  wrote:

> I still use floppies for config files.  It is the easiest configuration for
> a software geek to mangle together - take a floppy off an old system, plug
> in the IDE cable and you're in business.  My earliest LEAF systems
> (Dachstein and uClibc Bering) ran completely off of the floppy (on a 486DX w
> 16Mb of RAM)
>
> I'm interested in the CF media or moving off old PC platforms to something
> like the Alix platform.  But that is a lot  of hardware/low level software
> learning curve.
>
> Having said all that, I do boot my current systems from CD and just save
> configuration to floppy.  I believe that would work nicely with a 2.6
> kernel.
>
> Ken
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 18:39, Dillabough, Dave 
> <dave.dillabo...@bcgeu.ca>wrote:
>
>> Hi Erich,
>>
>> How much of an issue is having write protection? I can understand that it
>> is better in theory but I can't think of a commercial firewall product
>> (Cisco PIX, Linksys, DLink etc) that does not use flash and that has any
>> sort of write protection. If having boot from R/O media is an issue you
>> could boot from CD and save to a floppy. You could also write protect CF
>> media with a hardware hack to the cable. With USB/CF systems I always keep a
>> backup of the boot media. It's not as simple as a power cycle but I can
>> always get back to a known state if I need to although this has yet to be an
>> issue for me. So from my perspective this would seem to be a non issue for
>> most users and that for those few where it is an issue there are ways around
>> it with some extra work.
>>
>> Obviously I don't have your perspective on the issue and I may be in the
>> minority here and while I don't need 2.6 features yet it does seem to me
>> that there must be quite a lot of development work that goes into squeezing
>> a working system onto a floppy. It would be a shame if this is being done to
>> no purpose.
>>
>> Does anyone on the list boot a system from floppy disk or save config
>> files to floppy disk?
>>
>>
>> I will take a look at the 2.6 CVS.
>>
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Erich Titl [mailto:erich.t...@think.ch]
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 2:40 PM
>> To: Dillabough, Dave
>> Cc: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net
>> Subject: Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> Dillabough, Dave wrote:
>> > I'm wondering how much of an issue it is to have a system that will fit
>> on a floppy. I would think that being able to boot off of a USB drive or a
>> CD/USB combo would be more pertinent today given as few machines even come
>> with a floppy as standard equipment anymore.  USB booting would eliminate
>> the futzing around with non standard disk sizes and would be a lot more
>> reliable and as well. I have been running some variant of LRP/LEAF since the
>> 2.x days both at home and for various work related uses and the most common
>> failure is mechanical i.e. drives or fans. I switched to booting off of CF
>> cards and fanless power supplies a couple of years ago and am much closer to
>> my goal of having a solid state  appliance that I can install and ignore.
>> Even buying the smallest CF cards available I still need only a small
>> fraction of the card to boot LEAF. The world has moved on from the floppy
>> drive and I think trying to keep future versions of LEAF small enough to
>> boot from a floppy is l
>> argely an artificial constraint now. If for some reason the use of a
>> floppy is required then older versions of LEAF are still available.
>>
>> do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash
>> disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory
>> world.
>>
>> There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy
>>
>> - size
>> - write protection
>>
>> In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There
>> have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the
>> device driver.
>>
>> There has been a experimental 2.6 release on CVS which was hardly used
>> by anyone, hey, this is an open source project, get your hands dirty.
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Erich
>>
>>
>>
>>
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