OOPS!  Almost missed this point:

Mailing List Account for Jason Runyan wrote:
> but modern kernels are large enough these rarely fit 
> on  a floppy anymore either.

Um...while I won't dispute that you can easily craft a kernel that would 
be larger than a single floppy, please note the following:

[root@localhost boot]# ls -l bzImage
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       889141 May  6 01:52 bzImage

Also, lest you think this is some crafty trick of mine (I am known for a 
floppy-based firewall distribution afterall), the above bzImage is the 
result of my kernel compile presentation at the ILUG meeting on 
Saturday, and is a current (2.4.21-rc1-ac3) kernel compiled with the 
default RedHat Athlon kernel configuration file (extracted from the 
2.4.18-14 kernel source shipped by default with RedHat 8.0).

I'd call that pretty mainstream, and it easily fits on a 3-1/2" floppy, 
as further evidenced by my previous post (this is the kernel I used to 
make a self-booting linux floppy) and a simple examination of the filesize.

For what it's worth, kernels compiled for floppy disk firewall usage and 
compressed with UPX are typically in the 300-500K range, and I acutally 
use the zImage target rather than bzImage, since the resulting file is 
actually small enough to use the original linux bootstrap code.

...or by "floppy" do you mean something like an old 360K drive?

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles@steinkuehler.net