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Swift Linux 0.1.2 is now availableSwift Linux 0.1.2 is now availablePosted Aug 25, 2011 5:49 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)Parent article: Swift Linux 0.1.2 is now available Hmm, Looks like yet another Linux distribution aimed at old computers that lacks the one thing some old computers need: ability to initiate installation from a floppy. (Of course doing the entire installation from a ton of floppies is impractical these days, the installer should then be able to continue with CD or network). Like the one Pentium laptop I have that I would like to use because it has a quite nice keyboard. It has a working CD drive, but I have not discovered any way to make it boot off it (yes, bootmanagers have been tried).
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Swift Linux 0.1.2 is now available Posted Aug 29, 2011 20:41 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Maybe somebody could make a floppy that would allow booting from any CD or a USB drive? That may be an interesting project. I think GRUB2 has most of the stuff that would be needed, including USB and ATA support.
Swift Linux 0.1.2 is now available Posted Sep 7, 2011 13:09 UTC (Wed) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
The problem (booting from CDROM) is that the floppy bootloader has to leave a TSR(1) (a BIOS driver to simulate an El-Torito(2) disk) in memory after it has transfered the control to the CDROM bootloader.
That ATAPI driver cannot be written in protected mode, like the GRUB2 driver is. IMO only one bootloader can do what is needed.
(1) Terminate and Stay Resident, i.e. an interrupt handler in real mode with its code below the 1 Mbyte barrier.
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