RE: [9fans] new bootstrap structure

["Jason Gurtz" <jason@tommyk.com>]

> what to do for people without CD drives is a
> seperate question.

  I'm not sure how many people around here have played much with the grub bootloader.  It supports quite a few "standardish" Ethernet adapters as well as built in support for reading FAT and other file systems.  This comes in handy as grub features a built in (very) mini shell not entirely unlike what the PROM offers in a RISC box.  The hapless admin can hand boot an OS from any of the recognized file systems. The version I've built for booting GNU/Linux weighs in <115K.  It might be a bit more than Plan 9 needs but it could be a good source of ideas.  Find it here:  http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ 

  I few days ago I did an ftp install of FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE.  It's pretty smooth; one downloads 2 1.44 Meg floppy images, dd them to disks (gah, 5 out of 7 were ready for the bin) and boot.  The rest of it was fairly intuitive to me save for that it's not immediately clear when you are done.  There was no wording to suggest that indeed all tasks were complete and I should reboot now.  Other than that I had my cake and ate it too  :)  I would consider it close to a model install process.

P.S.  Don't be afraid of the GNU people calling it alpha software.  It has yet to fail me in several situations.  But maybe better programmers like yourselves would have a clearer view of whether to be afraid or not  ;)

Cheers,

~Jason

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