[syslinux] Thanks Peter

[H. Peter Anvin]

James Alan Brown wrote:

> Dear Peter,
> 
> first: thanks for the very prompt reply,
> 
> I am not sure I would like to download 
> 400+ meg file on my 56k modem though. 
> Can that CD be purchased on line?
> 


No, sorry, I'm not in the CD publishing and fulfillment business; so far
noone seems to have expressed interest in publishing in.

You probably can get away with just downloading the "buildtree" tarball,
though.

> Do you happen to know of any good books that 
> cover this in high detail?
> 
> How for example did people use/setup Linux 
> before the Red Hat days?


This is a huge topic and definitely not appropriate for this mailing list.

There are two ways you can do this, in practice:

a) Compile your kernel with ide-scsi (*no* ide-cdrom) and set /dev/sr0 as
the root device.  This will work for SCSI, USB and (via ide-scsi) ATAPI
CD-ROM drives.

b) Use an initrd (in v2.5 or patched v2.4 kernels, initramfs) to prod
around the system looking for a CD-ROM and then mount it.  This is a bit
more flexible than (a), especially you don't have to mount the CD as /
(the SuperRescue disk mounts the CD as /usr and uses a ramfs as /), but
requires you to build the requisite initrd.

I recommend (b), but it's definitely more work.

	-hpa