In order to accomodate all of the hardware for which Linux drivers have been written, yet still provide boot-floppies that can fit on a 5.25-inch disk, the Debian 1.2 distribution will provide a mechanism to access all drivers that can be modularized as modules.
The default kernel has no IDE, no SCSI, little else. When the user sets up the system, it builds a RAM disk image that is loaded at boot time. The script on the RAM disk loads the modules for your local hardware configuration _before_ it mounts the root. Some things that still aren't modularized are in the default kernel.
The stripped-down kernel and the compressed installation root filesystem fit on one 1200K floppy and run fine that way. The floppy also contains a few of the most popular modules, and you get to feed it more floppies (or a CD) containing other modules depending on your configuration.
No-floppy bootstrap should be possible for systems with 8MB RAM and a CD or DOS hard disk. One-floppy NFS bootstrap should be possible.
See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/initrd.txt .
Programmers' and Policy Manuals that provide detailed explanations of
the Debian package management system and approach are provided with the
new version of dpkg.
In addition, the new version of dpkg will include new tools
for automating the construction of Debian packages, and for supporting
multiple architechtures.
Debian 1.2 will be equipped with the Shadow password suite of programs
and library routines which hide the plain text of the password file
from all users except root and provide for terminal access control,
and user and group administration. For details, see
http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/Shadow-Password-HOWTO.html.
This document is of course also included along with all the HOWTO's in
the Debian doc-debian package.
Most of the relevant Debian utilities have been modified to make them
support shadow passwords.
This includes the default login utility, as well as
vipw and vigr.
The xdm X11 login utility and the adduser script
will be made shadow aware as well. In addition, there will be minor
changes to the shadow packages themselves.
In addition, the Linux library of Pluggable Authentication Modules
(
http://gluon.physics.ucla.edu/~morgan/pam;
a.k.a. libpam) that allow sysadmins to choose authorization modes
on an application-specific basis will be available, and initially set to
authenticate via shadow password. However, release 1.2 will not include
PAM-aware applications.