[ale] Old Silicon, New Distros

[John Mills]

ALErs -

I am upgrading a box that won't boot from a CD-ROM (even though the BIOS 
boot-order claims to include a CD-ROM-first setting). It looks like the 
viable option is 3.5" FDD.

I'm leaning toward Slackware, but it appears Slack-12.0 doesn't include
the older 'bare' FD images, but now includes an 'sbootmgr.dsk' that sounds
like just the thing. If I understand, it's a small first-level bootloader
that fits easily on a 3.5" FD and can be commanded to then boot the box
from a CD drive.

Questions:
 1. Are the FD image 'boot' ('bare.i', etc) and 'root' ('install[1|2].*')  
disk images still included in Slack-12.0, and if so, where?

 2. Has anyone used 'sbootmgr', and have I understood what it's intended
to do?

 3. Is 'sbootmgr' Slackware specific, or could it be used to jump-start 
installation of other current distros when one can't boot directly from a 
CD (or DVD)?

Thanks for any wisdom on these issues.

 - John Mills