Re: Floppy Support

The Anarcat wrote:

> Why does everyone keep on trying to ditch the old hardware? It still
> works, doesn't it? It's still useful, isn't it?

The fact that FreeBSD insists on fitting its kernel onto floppies has so 
far prevented me from installing it on my not terribly new hardware. So 
where do we stand now? It seems FreeBSD is _encouraging_ people to use 
old hardware.

> So what if it it's pre-'95? Are we so "hip" that we need to drop support
> for everything older that 7 years?

Sure, why not. When hardware gets 7 years old, what's wrong with making 
the only supported upgrade paths "spend an hour installing a previous 
version and upgrade" or "buy a CDROM, cheapskate."

> I despise the habit of the computer industry of deprecating perfectly
> valid hardware in order to make sales.

You could easily extend that argument to say that Intel's efforts to 
make EFI booting more widespread are a bad thing. So here we have a 
company like Intel trying to make sales by making your future PC less 
broken than your current one, and yet you'll no doubt chant "but my BIOS 
works just fine. Why should I be forced to buy a new motherboard just to 
install FreeBSD 6.3??"

> I think you are mixing two problems: the CDROM boot and the FLOPPY boot.
> Those can be 2 totally different issues if we need to. Fix the CDROM
> boot to allow fatty kernels for your exotic hardware. But don't break
> the floppy boot, a lot of less fortunate folks need it.

Need? Will you NEED FreeBSD 5.1 for your machine? I *will*, because 5.0 
doesn't support mine. I honestly can't see an announcement along the 
lines of "to install FreeBSD 6, you'll need either a CDROM drive, or a 
FreeBSD 5.0 installation" as the big step backwards you're making it out 
to be.

	Duraid