/usr on USB

[John]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:

>On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 09:17:43AM +0800, John wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I've never tried booting from a USB hard disk; I imagine the BIOS would 
>>>have
>>>to provide some emulation help, or else the boot loader would never cope.
>>>      
>>>
>>Didn't you say you have a Powerbook? I am pretty sure that will boot 
>>from firewire.
>>    
>>
>
>No, I don't, and I don't have a USB hard drive either.  I do have a USB DVD
>drive, and a machine which can boot an Ubuntu install CD from it.  But this
>is transparent to the installer up to a point; it doesn't know that it's
>been booted from a USB device until it tries to mount it.
>
>  
>
Presumably, if all the right modules are in the initrd it will just 
work, the drive should appear as just another SCSI device.

Speaking of SCSI, has anyone actually tried installing from a SCSI CD 
drive? I can't, all my SCSI CD drives are in oldworld Macs, Ultrasparcs 
(I installed from SCSI CD on those, but that was Woody).

I did try booting various installers to see what could see my USB drive. 
Most did, but I don't recall what d-i did.

I'll try again later today.

>>>Yes, I think we may have inadvertently broken that with an optimisation.
>>>I'll look into it.  NFS gets special treament, and is mounted later in
>>>the boot process.  USB doesn't (and couldn't use the same mechanism).
>>>      
>>>
>>Tried NFS over wireless?
>>    
>>
>
>No, and I wouldn't be inclined to try, given the throughput and latency.
>Unlike USB, though, this is trivial to change; it's just a matter of moving
>the firmware from /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware to /lib/firmware.
>
>  
>
I agree It's not currently attractive for normail use, but USB wasn't 
either before USB2.

btw I have bz another kick as someone suggested, and it's still 
persisiting in our hate-hate relationship: I don't like bz, and this 
implementation of bz clearly doesn't like me.