Re: why one rescue & boot disk? (was Re: An 'ae' testimony)
Joey Hess wrote: > Steve Lamb wrote: > > Two seperate functions. Why are we trying to cram two seperate > > functions > > into one? > > Good question. If we're getting very cramped (I'm sure we are :-), it might > be time to think about splitting the two. >From what I've been seeing, it does look like the boot disk is getting cramped. Putting something bigger that ae on the boot disk seems ludicrous to me, as the install doesn't need a editor for most installs anyway. > I can see one very big advantage > to using the same disk for two thing though. It means that a new user, who > has just installed debian, magically has a rescue disk, without any extra > work. If making a rescue disk was an additional step, most newbies wouldn't > do it. I made them all the time, but then I'd misplace them, or reuse them later. If I needed a rescue disk, I'd end up downloading the latest version of tom's, and use that. But then again, as long as I stuck with stable (Debian) releases, and followed the directions, I didn't have a broken system. I doubt if too many newbies breaking their systems are going to be able to fix their systems with a only boot disk. > (It may also mean less work by the boot floppies guys. Or not - if we used > say, Tom's Root Boot as our rescue disk, we wouldn't have to maintain all > that stuff and could devote more time to the basic install. I've heard very > good things about Tomsrtbt.) It used to work for me. My latest recovey floppy is not a floppy at all, but a bootable CD, that runs root the root fs in a ram disk, and then links back to the CD which is a complete copy of a working debian image. This gives me vi, emacs, X, copies of all the library files, and anything I'd might need to repair something thats broke. Mark
Re: An 'ae' testimony
Craig Sanders wrote: > being restricted to a primitive editor after you have become > proficient with vi is akin to re-learning how to talk after having a > stroke...you've lost some really fundamental ability which you take > for granted. This sounds like a great arguement to use any editor other than vi for anything. In order to protect new users from the evils of vi, lets replace vi with a script that echos: "The use of vi can cause learning disabilties, as though you had a stroke" If you can't figure out how to use ae (in a not vi emulation mode), are you sure you want to install Linux on your own? As far as a recovery disk goes, you are much better off with a real recovery disk. The boot disk is severely crippled when compared to other recovery disks that are readily available. Mark Blunier
Re: An 'ae' testimony
On 22 May 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote: > Aside from that, I think the best we can hope for is an "expanded > rescue" situation, i.e., an optional two- or three- floppy rescue > image, or (Corel is working on this) a rescue system bootable from a > CD or other media. I've already done it. My 'rescue' CD is an image of a working Debian system (including X, ftp server, emacs, vi, and anything else I want to put on a 600 meg system), that boots from either a floppy or the CD. The scripts that I've used to create it are at: http://www.ocslink.com/~blunier Mark Blunier
Re: why one rescue & boot disk? (was Re: An 'ae' testimony)
On 24 May 1999, Christian Leutloff wrote: > > superb, IMHO that's called a Live-CD. Would it be possible to > integrate the creation stuff into the debian-cd script? It would be > really nice if people can test Debian on a CD-ROM first. > I suppse that could be done. I've been making the CD's image from a partition with debian installed (hdb3), but running linux off an installation on hdb2. This made things easier for developement work. Mark Blunier Live CD project http://www.ocslink.com/~blunier/
Re: An 'ae' testimony
On Mon, 24 May 1999, Joey Hess wrote: > Hamish Moffatt wrote: > Slang is quite usable as just a text display library. You can ignore the > embedded language aspects. > > It's a weird library. Should really be two separate libs I think. That would help the space problem on the boot disks Mark
RE: why one rescue & boot disk? (was Re: An 'ae' testimony)
On Mon, 24 May 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > : superb, IMHO that's called a Live-CD. Would it be possible to > : integrate the creation stuff into the debian-cd script? It would be > : really nice if people can test Debian on a CD-ROM first. > > And it would be triply cool if you could front end it with a small kernel > selector, to pick a kernel that supports your hardware. The current kernels > are pretty good, but there are a couple of choices. Then it could be a > generic rescue CD. In some of my test disks, I have included ide (and sbpcd) support in the kernel. After booting, the modules for sound, printing, serial, etc, are on the CD and can be loaded. A ide/scsi boot kernel should cover a large number of systems that can boot off CD. The disk is rather tight on space, and modules for sbpcd, aztcd, etc, don't fit on the boot disk. I'd need a mount a second floppy to get load the modules. As a side not, since the el torito CD's can use 1.44 or 2.88 meg boot images, a 2.88 meg boot image would provide a lot of space for jumbo kernels. I don't have a 2.88 meg drive, and haven't found a way to make one without one. If someone could send me the image of a 2.88 meg disk that has been made bootable with syslinux, I'd appreciate it. > > And by the way, why isn't this a package ? At least the iso-image > generation part of it if the cd image is too big (I would think it is). > Share the wealth, this sounds like a really, really nice tool. A few reasons. 1) I still consider my scripts to be in alpha development 2) In its current form, LiveCD depends on patches to the kernel to load a .tgz file as the root file system. The patch does seem to make the kernel bigger, but at this stage (alpha code), it makes the development cycle much easier than trying to create a boot disk with a compressed file system on it. 3) Other people havent shown much interest in the project. 4) I'm not a developer. Mark Blunier
