Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> James Miller wrote:
> > So, perhaps HD space cannot be as efficiently used as if BL3
> > were using a native ext2 filesystem.
>
> It is using one!  Execute 'mount' from inside BL3 and you see
> that the root filesystem is ext2.

Well, when it's running it uses ext2.  But when it's not running, it's
stored on FAT16.  So maybe not as much data can be stored per MB or
cluster on fs.img as on a native ext2 partition.  Just a guess, based on
some things I've heard/read about various filesystems and their
capabilities.  This method may have so many other interesting
possibilities and flexibilities that they outweigh any deficiencies in the
HD space efficiency department though.  Especially the possibility to have
multiple copies/backups of fs.img seems like a big plus.

BL3 seems set up such that the user devotes the whole of their HD space to
DOS - no need for repartitioning and the risks involved with that.  This
is a big plus in the user-friendliness area.

Just out of curiosity:  I'm presuming the following would work.
1) boot to BL2 ramdisk version
2) create a 15MB partition on the HD at, say, /dev/hda2
3) create ext2 filesystem on /dev/hda2
4) mount /dev/hda2 at, say, /mnt/hda2
5) mount the DOS drive where BL3 resides at, say, /DOS
6) cd to /DOS/baslin and do dd if=fs.img of=/mnt/hda2

It gets BL3 on an ext2 HD partition, correct?  Comments?

Can a user create his/her own fs.img from within BL3 (or maybe BL2
ramdisk), stipulating a given size?

Thanks, James