Re: Fixit live cd amd64

If memory serves me right, Ed Schouten wrote:
> * Bruce A. Mah <bmah_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>> If memory serves me right, Ed Schouten wrote:
>>> * Bruce A. Mah <bmah_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>> The Live CD is actually its own disk on amd64 (and maybe one or two
>>>> other architectures). You want the disk that corresponds to
>>>> 7.0-CURRENT-200706-amd64-livefs.iso.
>>> Which is, in my opinion, a regression. With previous releases it was
>>> still possible to perform an installation of FreeBSD by hand. Now you
>>> need two CD-ROM drives; one with the livefs to boot from and another one
>>> containing all install sets.
>> No, that's not true.  You don't boot off the livefs CD...you boot off of
>> disc1, which also contains all of the installation sets.  The livefs is
>> used principally for the Fixit feature.  It's perfectly possible to do a
>> 7.0 snapshot installation on amd64 with a single CD and a single CD-ROM
>> drive; I just did this a few days ago in fact.
> 
> To make sure we're talking about the same subject: with installing
> FreeBSD `by hand', I mean performing an installation without using
> sysinstall, but just your shell, newfs, tar, etc.

Hrm.  OK, that's not the same as what I thought you meant.  Sorry for
the misunderstanding.

>> It'd be nice if the livefs content could fit onto the first CD, but we
>> just ran out of space.
> 
> Would there still be room on the livefs CD to store only the `base'
> install set? That would sure be a life-saver for a lot of people.

I'm not really convinced that this use case is all that common, to be
honest, and I don't see us re-doing our release creation scripts to do
this ("but what about kernels?  or lib32?").  But anyways, just to run
the numbers...

The live filesystem is (about) 400MB.  All of the 7.0-CURRENT-200706
snapshot is 349M, and out of that, the base distribution is 50MB.  So
one could theoretically do this.  I think that if you really want such a
thing, it wouldn't be hard to re-master the existing disks to do this.

I'm sure I'm pointing out the obvious when I mention that these problems
would be alleviated (for now) if we assumed DVD-size media when we made
ISOs, rather than standard-length CD-ROM media.  The subject has come up
at least once in the past few months, but I can't remember where (if
anywhere) this idea went.  I know that at least one CD-ROM vendor makes
combined DVDs, for instance.

I was going to point out that the tools you listed above are available
in the emergency holographic shell environment, but you probably also
wanted disk partitioning tools such as bsdlabel and fdisk, which aren't
there.  :-p

Bruce.