CD-ROM from SCO unlikely

[Steven M. Schultz]

Tim -

> What are you going to do - wait until Steven dies (I swear he'll be releasing
> updates to 2BSD for the rest of his life) before making a CD?

	The pace is slowing down due to lack of copious free time for major
	projects but yeah, i kinda figure every couple months I'll find
	something that needs fixing/tweeking/etc ;)

> Incidentally, a couple of weeks ago I made a nice bootable Iomega ZIP
> cartridge with the current 2.11 generic kernel and everything in /usr.  It all
> barely fits in the 100 Mbytes (well, 3*65536*512 bytes) available, and

	How "speedy" is a ZIP drive?  I keep threatening to get a JAZ drive
	for my 11 - they're nice.  I don't like the DB25 style of cable
	that the normal external ZIP drive uses so I'd have to find one of the
	rare internal ZIP drives and stuff it into a traditional shoebox.

> -11's with SCSI host adapters than the traditional tape distribution.

	Tape's good for backups though, so when I don't feel like putting up
	with the racket of the 9-track I just cable up the 4mm drive to
	the 11/73.  Alas, the QIC style of drives don't work, at least not
	with the Emulex UC08.  For a brief moment the Seagate Tapestore 8000
	appeared to work but then the whole system/controller hung (I suspect
	the UC08 doesn't know how to deal with more modern tape drives).  
	The older QIC (Wangtek-5150ES) doesn't work at all - the UC08 barfs
	at drives that don't do variable record mode.  Do the CMD adaptors
	do any better with "PC" style SCSI tape devices?

> It's also worth pointing out that on the Q-bus SCSI host adapters that I
> have - the CMD CQD440, the Emulex UC08, and the Andromeda SCDC - bootable
> CD-ROM distributions are entirely possible.  I'm not sure if 2.11BSD will

	Uh, 2.11 doesn't know how to deal with 2048 byte sectors or the 
	ISO9660 filesystem.  Now a MO drive that used 512 byte sector'd
	media should work just fine - but that style of drive is fading
	in popularity.

> boot from a read-only device - Steven, have you tried this? 
 
	It'll panic.  For a couple reasons:  pipes are implemented via
	the filesystem rather than sockets so anything involving pipes
	needs a rw filesystem.  And a swap area is needed.  If there's
	memory available there won't be any actual swapping going on but
	argument gathering, etc during an 'exec' can use a small amount of
	swap space.  It might be possible to use a 'ram' disk but it's not
	clear to me it'd be worth the trouble.

	Steven


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