Re: 8MB install

John Birrell wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 10:15:19PM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> > There *are* other ways to install than booting a CDROM; they are
> > just more labor intensive, and require FreeBSD running on a more
> > poswerful machine to set up the install for the other machine.
> 
> True. Anyone who wants to install on a small machine should consider using
> a network boot first. Build on a faster machine, then user etherboot on
> the target machine to check it out. Sure it'll be slow, but all you have to
> do once the machine is netbooted is fdisk, label the disk, newfs it and copy
> over the stuff you need. Then reboot. If it doesn't work, netboot again and
> have another go.

Exactly.  The main use for memory sizes this small these days
(since you can't generally buy the seperate parts any more) is
for embedded processor cores with on-die memory of that size,
whih means for embedded systems.  Doing developement for these,
you have to expect to treat them as targets, rather than as
developement platforms themselves.  If you are targetting it
anyway, you might as well do the work on your developement
machines instead.

If you don't have an extra 5M after netbooting, then you should
probably create the disk image on the developement machine, and
unpack it onto the target, instead of trying to use sysinstall
after netbooting (the 12M limit someone else mentioned comes
from expecting to run sysinstall).

-- Terry