[syslinux] isolinux 2.01 bug with Compaq and Promise BIOS

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Sun Apr 13 16:05:26 PDT 2003


[Please don't take threads like these private.  They're much better 
handled in public.]

Patrick J. Volkerding wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 13 Apr 2003, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>>P.S. Why are you trying 2.01 and not 2.03?
> 
> I'll field that one.  Slackware's using 2.01 because there's limited space
> on the installer disc, and I don't want to have to put mtools on there.
> It'd be great to see a future compile option to _not_ have an mtools
> dependancy.  After all, we're not ever planning to ship syslinux setuid,
> which I seem to recall was the reason for the change.  (Really, IMHO you'd
> have to be nuts to install something like syslinux that way)
> 

The whole reason is to not require running setuid while supporting 
what's quite necessary to a lot of people -- installing on a disk image. 
  This was among other things a precondition for getting rid of the 
(broken) Linux kernel bootsector.

Note that this only applies to the installer -- i.e. what you need to 
build a boot floppy or similar.  I find it a bit hard to understand what 
particular environment would have a strong size dependency and still 
only be used for that purpose.  I'm willing to be enlightened, though, 
but I don't want to spend the time messing with it unless I understand 
what the need is.

	-hpa



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