Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> version of BasicLinux.  There's quite a lot of uClibc stuff
> being developed, so it wouldn't be as much a dead end as
> libc5.  I'll give that some thought.
>
Let me know if you'd like me to try any cruel experiments on this old 386
and uClibc libraries.

> > Shall I give it a whirl?  Pointers on how?
>
> The first problem is establishing a network.  I assume you
> are going to use PCMCIA?  Or did you have something else
> in mind?
>
The network wasn't a huge problem.  This is not a laptop, so PCMCIA isn't
relevant.  I have lots of old smc-ultra NIC's laying around, so I stuck
one in there.  It was a bit of a problem installing the OS: I didn't view
the readme, so I wasn't quite getting why fd.bat wasn't making a bootable
floppy.  Anyway, I finally caught on and got the < 4MB BL1 (1.7, I think)
installed.  I knew which modules I'd need to load, and I downloaded the
smc-ultra one.  Those insmod'ed just fine.  But I did have a problem with
the dhcp client available at the BL1 download site (my temporary
router/firewall uses dhcp).  Was it your creation, or Chris'?  It seemed
to get a dhcp offer and set itself up, but the network was unreachable.
ifconfig revealed eth0 was assigned no address (even though the dhcp
client seemed to indicate it was assigning one).  It also didn't seem to
know the -net address, or the gateway's address - the latter in spite of
the fact that when the client loaded, it correctly identified the
gateway's address.  Only by finally entering those parameters manually did
I finally get the thing on the network.  So, the dhcp client for BL1
really seems non-functional.  Have you heard feedback from anyone else on
it?  I think I'm going to need to switch over to dhcp, so it would be nice
if we could get it working.

Perhaps more to follow.

James