Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> > On Fri, 16 Jul 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> I find it rather confusing to get hold of Debian packages.

Debian's package management system is designed so that you don't have
to/shouldn't have to, download discrete packages and install them by hand.
It's all supposed to be automated and taken care of by the package
management system - which, typically, expects to connect to the internet
and package repositories.  Removeable media (e.g., CD's) can also be
specified as package repositories though.  That's probably why you have
difficulty finding Debian "packages."  You don't download a package under
Debian: you issue apt-get install prog-name and the package manangement
system downloads and installs the program - with dependencies (and
probably then some: as Steven has observed, it undoutedly leads to some
unnecessary system bloat).  How BL would work in this scenario remains a
bit unclear: you couldn't just use any Debian package repository.  You'd
have to use one with packages built specifically with uClibc.  For now,
the uClibc site provides a really good selection, and could be used as a
repository (or the progs could be burnt to CD and the CD used as a
repository).  But will they keep providing the full Debian distro built
with uClibc there?  This is not clear to me.  I don't know of any other
Debian site/repository that uses uClibc in building their packages.

> But I don't want to sacrifice an entire partition to swap partition. I
> have one Win98 FAT32, one FAT16 DOS, one BL2 and one spare which I was
> going to use for BL3.  The hard drive is 16G.  I suppose I could add a
> second drive for swap partition but then I would need to add a power
> connector for it.  Can someone explain how to make a swap file on an
> existing partition, and can it be on the FAT32 or FAT16 or BL2 partition,
> for use by both BL2 and BL3?

Yeah, sounds like a swap file (as opposed to swap partition) is what you
want.  Seems to me like this could be a stand-in for the safety valve swap
provides.  I've never done it, but Steven has described to me in some
previous post how to do it.  Did you search the archive?  If not, try
that.  I'm pretty sure a swap file can be put on a FAT partition, yes.
That's what Knoppix does/did if it needs to be run in marginal RAM
conditions and has access to a Win partition (running from CD).  Beyond
this I can't say much about it: I think I would have to do just as much
research as you to figure out the finer points.

James