On 24 March 2014 15:32, Tethys tethys@gmail.com wrote:
Since the normal way to boot a PC now is a complete functioning OS on a single removable-media volume - be that an optical disk or USB flash media
Uhhh... wow. That's quite some selection bias you have going on there. For the record, I'm not aware of a single Linux user that boots their system that way. To hear it described as "normal" is somewhat strange.
Perhaps I should have been clearer; my apologies. I meant for installation, recovery or repair purposes.
I am not aware of /any/ modern distro that has boot, root & source media any more, or which supports installation from multiple floppies. Even offering installation from multiple CDs is rare to unheard-of now. Indeed CD support itself is disappearing - they're too small for OSes here in the 2nd decade of C21.