Installing Slackware 8.0

[Adam Myrow]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Toby Fisher wrote:

> Sheesh!  6 disks?  Why?  What's wrong with the current root disks?  Why
> can't they leave them in place for backwards compatibility and those who
> want/need to use them?

Here is how I understand the situation.  The way root disks normally work
is that you boot a compressed ramdisk.  That is, a root disk is nothing
more than a gzipped filesystem written directly to a disk.  The other
option is to boot multiple uncompressed disks as a ramdisk.  For whatever
reason, attempting to make the latest root disks caused the compressed
size to exceed 1.44MB.  Since the only choices are one compressed disk or
several uncompressed ones, the result is 5 root disks plus the main boot
disk.

As to why they just don't use the old one, they've reworked the pkgtool
and I think, the version has to match on the disk and the CD or something.
I do know that it uses longer file names that indicate the version of the
package you are installing and what platform it is compiled for.  However,
I agree that they could surely get the root disk smaller by cutting out
some garbage and using older versions of utilities.  For example, why does
an installer disk need telnet?  Maybe you should ask Pat yourself about
this.  I personally think that there will be enough outcry that he'll have
to do something before the final release since there have been a few flair
ups on Usenet over  this issue.