On 05/14/2012 08:15 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 11:49 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
> On 05/12/2012 09:51 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:00:48AM -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
>>
>>> So the set of people we'd be inconveniencing is exactly the set of
>>> people with no bandwidth and the inability to boot from anything larger
>>> than a CD.
>> Not only that - the people who have no bandwidth, the inability to boot
>> from anything larger than a CD and no USB ports that can be bootstrapped
>> from a bootloader sitting on a CD or floppy.
>>
>> USB has been required by Microsoft's logo program since 1999 and was
>> effectively ubiquitous on Pentium 2 before that, so the set of hardware
>> we're ruling out is at least 13 years old and more realistically
>> probably 15. We've already dropped support for x86 hardware that was in
>> production more recently than that.
>
> Reality can differ from the press releases. I have two running machines
> that contradict the conclusions above. Instead of 13 or 15 years,
> such an effective cutoff would be closer to about 8 years. I consider
> that to be uncomfortably young to be declared obsolete, especially
> when the declaration is issued at the end of a release cycle instead of
> at the beginning.
>
> The most important issue in this thread is ability to boot from USB2.0.
No, it isn't. mjg59 wrote:
"the inability to boot from anything larger than a CD and no USB ports
that can be bootstrapped from a bootloader sitting on a CD or floppy."
So you're talking past each other. You are assuming that direct boot
from USB is the minimum. Matthew reckons bootstrapping from a CD or
floppy is fine.
You can bootstrap from a CD to then boot from USB drives:
Example:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16822/boot-from-a-usb-drive-even-if-your-b...
.