Once upon a time, a collection of companies ruled the workstationmarket, selling what were then called '1M^3' machines, machines withone million MIPs, one megabyte of RAM, and one million (black andwhite) pixels. With computing so clearly heading their way, companieslike Apollo, DEC, IBM, HP, SGI, and Sun had futures so bright they hadto wear shades.

Computers have long since surpassed the '1M^3' level of performance,yet of the companies

I spent today building some of the infrastructure that will hopefullylet us safely Kickstart-install Fedora Core 4 on the new generationof SATA-based PC workstations. (Safely, because destroying a serverby accidentally starting a Kickstart install on it is one of my quietnightmares.)

What makes this difficult is a a simple decision, by itself sane andrational: the Linux kernel people decided that rather than making up anew set of block devices for things like USB memory sticks or SATAdisks, they would just reuse