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Ian Scott wrote:
>
> I am trying to get the xvesa ramdisk to run, 
> but I am having problems.

Oops, that's just something I knocked together quickly
for James.  It wasn't really meant for general consumption.

> I downloaded initrd-x.gz into my BL2 directory, and changed 
> boot,bat to use this, but I get a kernel panic - can't mount 
> root fs.

I think I'd better remove it so nobody else tries to download 
it.

> If I mount the old ramdisk version and try to gunzip and 
> mount initrd-x, I get "kernel does not support minix"

Hmmm, mininx.  Perhaps I used minix to save space?  The whole
point of the exercise was to get something to work in 5mb RAM.
I know I had to cut a lot of corners.  But it was a while ago 
(and I've done lots of different initrd's since) so I can't 
remember exactly what I did.  I didn't keep a copy of that 
particular version.

The BL2 kernel does not know minix.  The net.i and bare.i 
kernels do.  initrd-x was designed to be used with the net.i 
kernel.

> Do I need a different kernel?  Or am I doing something 
> else wrong?

My suggestion is to wait for BL3.  It's only a few weeks away.  
It will run X on the normal BasicLinux foundation (without so
many corners being cut).  I've currently got BL3 running an xterm 
(I'll trying adding icewm in a day or two).  At the moment I'm 
fiddling with fonts.  It appears that Xvesa only has 5x7, 5x8, 
and 6x13 fonts built in, so I'm trying to find the most compact 
way of adding bigger fonts.

I had hoped to use the new 2.0.40 kernel for BL3, but it wasn't
possible.  Xvesa won't work on that kernel (it seems to require
a capability not available until the 2.2 kernels).  I spent weeks 
compiling different versions of 2.0.40 and different versions of 
Xvesa -- all without success.  So, I'm using 2.2.16 (same as BL2).
That, as least, will avoid any problems with modules.  The actual
BL3 zimage, however, will be quite different from BL2.  It will
be significantly smaller *and* it will run on 386/486sx systems.

Initially, I'll be doing BL3 in the usual unzip-and-boot package.  
However, I was thinking about spliting bl3-00.zip into two parts 
(floppy-sized).  Download both parts, unzip, run install.bat and
then boot.bat.  Comments?

Cheers,
Steven