Karmic i386 flavour changes

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 08:56:33PM -0700, Geza Kovacs wrote:
> Rather than shipping both kernels on the Live CD, wouldn't it be more
> space-efficient to ship just the baseline legacy kernel on the CD, then
> have an empty linux-generic dummy package with a low version number (not
> the actual kernel) be installed if PAE is supported and there is > 4 GB
> RAM; that way the PAE kernel will be automatically downloaded and made
> default upon the next system update (or if internet access is available,
> as part of d-i's post-install stage)?

Firstly, that's pretty weird. :-) Secondly, it has the problem that you
get automatically switched to an entirely different kernel flavour on
your first update after reboot, which means that you could install,
think "aha, excellent, it supports all my hardware", and then discover
that the first update toasts your system. While obviously any situation
where a kernel fails to work is bad, in many ways it's much worse when
it happens on upgrade after you've done lots of work on a computer than
when it happens on a fresh install.

It's much better to install actual real packages, one way or another.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]