Baslinux mailing list

[Ian Scott <mriscott AT yahoo.co.uk>]

> 
> At the moment, BL3 must be in C:\baslin.  However, because 
> of the DrDOS problem, I might have to redo the routine that 
> locates the files (which won't be easy).  
> 
> When you combine the Xvesa/himem.sys problem (which probably
> only happens with loadlin) with the DrDOS problem, it makes 
> me wonder if I should reconsider the entire installation 
> method.


Hi,

Great work on BL3 - works great on my win98 machine (Mind you, I did boot with
F5 to skip autoexec.bat/config.sys, so I guess I may have missed the Xvesa
problem.  I have had various wierd probs with other distros before when 
booting
to linux from windows rather than from plain DOS - X not working, network card
not beinbg recongnised, etc.)

I was just thinking about how to get round this install directory problem, and
I have a cunning plan (which I'd love to try and help with btw).  However, I
have not played much with initrd, ramdisks, etc so I'm not sure - I'd love
input on this.

My plan is to have a small ramdisk installer, which boots a very simple 
ramdisk
version which:
 - Asks what directory you installed bl3 in
 - Asks what device it is on (probably should default to /dev/hda1, and give
 some meaningful other suggestions - e.g. /dev/sda1 for scsi [is this
supported in the kernel?], /dev/hda3 for DRDOS, /dev/hda5 for an extended
partition).
 - Mounts the given device and checks for the directory
 - if it can't find it, tries again.

 - Once we have a good directory:
    - gunzip the real initrd (or is it the fs.img file we need here, not sure
what is done where)
    - mount it via loop
    - edit the init scripts and /etc/fstab to use the correct drive and 
directory,
    - umount and regzip
    - output some messages explaining what we've done
    - reboot.

Thinking it through again, how about if this is an additional extra.  
Something
along the lines of "If you've got a baslinux in c:\baslin on a MSDOS system it
should all work fine - if you have problems or want to install somewhere else,
download and try this installer.

Just my thoughts.  Does anyone have any idea if this would work. I'm quite
happy to do the work if people think it's a good idea.

Ian