A colleague who has installed FreeBSD has suggested that if you're doing a DOS installation, it would be easier to download the disk 1 ISO image (or the mini-ISO image) to the DOS partition, instead of having to download the various *.xx files that make up the dists. Getting one file is easier than having to (recursively) download a bunch of files. If Sysinstall then had a "Install from ISO image on DOS partition" option at install time, this would be useful even if the user doesn't have a CD writer. Sysinstall would have to mount the DOS partition, then use the vn device to map to the ISO image (can you do that to files on DOS partitions?), and then mount the vn device as a CD image. Sounds plausible.
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Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-qa->qa Use short names for mailing list to make searches using the web query form work with the shown responsible. This also makes open PRs show up in the summery mail.
This is indeed possible. I have tested this as the following on 5.0, and had a patch for this on my old hard drive (which unfortunately started scratching and I lost a lot of my (FreeBSD) work... anyway) because it's cost effective as you mention it. ;-) # mount_msdosfs /dev/ad1s2 /dos # mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /dos/ftp/releng_5-ftp-disc1.iso md6 # mount_cd9660 /dev/md6 /cdrom I don't mind coming up with a patch again, when I find the time. Cheers. -- Hiten Pandya (hiten@unixdaemons.com, hiten@uk.FreeBSD.org) http://www.unixdaemons.com/~hiten/
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-bugs->randi Taking this.
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sysinstall has been replaced by bsdinstall in FreeBSD 9.x. Closing.