Re: [gentoo-dev] rc4

[drobbins@gentoo.org]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 06:04:04PM +0000, Thomas Flavel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Glad to see there's finally a mailing list, now I can bug everyone and
> not just Daniel personally... ;)
> 
> > Can we please have pcmcia support in the default kernel?  It's a real
> > pain having to install off the CD and then build a new kernel, put it 
> > on floppy and then move to that to the machine in question.  It'll be
> > a bigger pain if that laptop ends up being my only working machine. 8(
> 
> Hmm, I recall asking if rc3 could have gcc and the kernel source 
> available from the boot cd - I see the kernel source code is in the
> packages directory, but I think there may have been a
> mis-communication... I actually meant that gcc be executable from
> boot.img so that a kernel can be compiled directly from the boot cd
> (onto ramfs presumably, unless you mount anything else) without having
> to install anything to a hard disk - I for one would find this very
> useful, and I'm surprised I haven't seen any other distros do this.
> Comments please

I think that's impossible right now, since the kernel sources need to be
on a read/write filesystem.  However, I believe that this is changing with
the official 2.4.0 release (or some time soon), which will allow the sources
to reside on the CD.  Then, it'll be possible.  Otherwise, you'd need ~150Mb
of spare RAM just to hold the upacked kernel sources in a RAM filesystem.

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.