Baslinux mailing list

["HenRi KiRya" <henry AT cmf.co.ug>]

i was wondering for those of us guys tha dont have cd burners
but can still download iso images of knoppix, damn small linux
and would love to give them a spin

since its possible to mount an iso image in basic linux
can one also install such a distro to hard disk without the physical cd ?


-----Original Message-----
From: James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>
To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org <baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Friday, September 26, 2003 10:00 PM
Subject: Re: [BL] Install to HD, etc


>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!
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