Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Sheldon Isaac wrote:

> I have been using DOS and Windows9x for years, and want to try Linux.
>
> On Wednesday I got a computer to do that:
> 300 MHz AMD K6-2
> FIC VA-503+ PCB 1.X
> 64 Mb
> HITACHI CDR-7730
> 3.5" Floppy disk drive (3.5")
> 3.23 GB HD
> Matrox MGA Mystique
> Gameport
> Sound Blaster 16/AWE-32 compatible card
> U.S. Robotics 56K int modem
> 3Com Fast EtherLink XL 10/100Mb TX Ethernet NIC (3C905B-TX)
>
> I have BasicLinux (baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org) which loads from DOS into
> ramdisk. It works, but I am so un-learned that I can't mount any of the
> logical drives from my second HD (it has no primary partitions, just E:,
> F:, and G in an extended partition)
> And the NIC can't be found by the  netsetup  command.
>
To mount those drives/partitions, you need to create mount points first.
Just as an example:
-------------------------------
mkdir /mnt/hdb6
mount /dev/hdb6 /mnt/hdb6
-------------------------------
Then, cd to the /mnt/hdb6 dir and you can look at and manipulate files
there.  I use hdbx because you said "second HD" and hdbx is the slave
drive on the primary channel.  If you made that drive master of the
secondary IDE channel, it would be hdcx, not hdbx.  I used the number 6 as
the partition number because extended partitions/logical drives under
Linux use the numbers 5 and above to designate the partitions within them.
hda, hdb, hdc, hdd are the physical disk, the number placed after each
representing the partition(s) on the physical disk.  Note: the disk *must*
have partitions on it to install BL - or any other operating system.
3Com NICs are well supported by Linux, so you should be able to get it to
work easily.  BL doesn't autodetect anything, but expects you to know what
module your NIC takes and to load it - either manually or via some startup
script.  If you're using the ramdisk version of BL, you're pretty much
limited to just a couple of NIC modules and to loading them manually
(insmod NICmodulename_here).

> I was wondering whether Gnoppix can be installed to a hard drive.
> The "new" computer has Win98SE on it.
>
Knoppix definitely can: especially in the latest (3.2) version have they
made this fairly simple to do.  They've even given parted a gui frontend.
I think Gnoppix differs from Knoppix only insofar as the default desktop
is concerned (Gnome with Gnoppix instead of KDE for Knoppix).  But I've
only tried Knoppix, not Gnoppix, so these are really educated guesses.  Of
course you'd have to free up space on the HD for the install - that's what
parted does, i.e., "squeezes" existing data on a HD to make free space
for new partition(s).  If you don't have a free partition, you'll need to
use parted or something like it (FIPS is the DOS counterpart, but has no
gui frontend, so far as I know).

> (I think Basic Linux can be installed to a hard drive?)
>
Execute "install" from the command line in BL ramdisk for instructions on
doing that.  Again, it will require that you have a free partition.
That's in addition to some other substantial files the install routine
will need from Slack 7.1.

> As I understand it, if I have a friend download
> ftp://source.rfc822.org/pub/local/gnoppix/gnoppix-0.5.5-2.iso
> and burn it to a CD-R, I can boot Gnoppix from the CD-R?
>
Don't try Gnoppix on a machine with only 64MB RAM.  It won't work.  It's
probably very much like Knoppix, requiring a minimum of 96MB RAM to boot
into graphical mode.  If you want to try out a graphical mode "live CD"
Linux on that 64MB RAM machine, go for DamnSmallLinux (
www.damnsmalllinux.org ).  I've got it running on a thin client with 64Mb
RAM and it works great.  All the plug and play amenities of Knoppix but
without the bulk.  I'm quite impressed with it.

James

PS Steven: can I send you a copy of DamnSmallLinux?  It's got a copy of
"Links hacked" on it that could make a nice alternate BL2 browser, as well
as a Dillo version that does frames and tabbed browsing!