Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> > What else can we do with ar besides unpack .deb files?  
> 
> ar is an archiving utility (similar to tar).  It is the
> archiver of choice for libraries.

What sorts of things do you envision people using it for in BL3?

> 
> > I have been unable to access the older Deb distributions 
> > via the link to Debian archives at archive.debian.org/debian-archive.
> 
> Unlike Slackware, Debian does not mantain old collections.  However,
> with some clever googling you can find defunct Debian stuff in odd 
> corners.

It sure looks like Debian intended to maintain the archives, but I am told 
the link is not accessible when I click on it from archive.debian.org 
(which has lots of information about the different versions of Debian).
How would the older stuff be labelled?  The file I found had the name and 
version and date:  ratpoison-1.0.0-1.cvs.2002117-2.i386.deb.  I suppose I 
could just search on ratpoison*cvs*.deb but what tells me the version 
number of Debian?

Slackware seems a lot more friendly towards older hardware.

> 
> > You also put in 'echo', I think, which will help with compiling.
> 
> That's not why it's there.

Is it because you use it in your scripts?

> > But 15M is sort of small for compiling in 
> 
> The 15mb filesystem was not designed for compiling.
> 
> > and I never could quite understand how to make it larger.  
> 
> Do you understand how to make a separate Linux partition on your 
> harddisk and put an ext2 filesystem on it?

I can make the partition, but I only managed to install using your
'install' script in BL2 and your install to hd package in BL3.  

> > I hope you will write a faq on that 
> 
> I'd rather write a script.

That would be greatly appreciated, thanks.  It will encourage people to 
use BL3 instead of BL1.  

> 
> > so people with low-RAM systems won't need to struggle through 
> > installing plain X on BL1 if they want X in more colors.
> 
> That does not make sense.  Why would they put plain X on BL1
> when they can simply run Xvesa on BL3?  The 15mb filesystem
> is certainly no problem in that regard.

I don't know, but obviously there are still people who want to install
linux to hard disk on an 8-M RAM computer rather than run linux using 
loop.  David Lane, can you explain your reasons

Could someone simply substitute the BL3 kernel and pppd into BL1 and then 
add rxvt and its dependencies, and run Xvesa from the command line?  
Xvesa --screen 800x600x15 &rxvt -e program-to-be-run?  I could put 
together a few files from BL3 into a .tgz package for BL1 if requested.  

First I want to get something like that made for BL2.

Sindi