Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

> > The BL3 floppies are different.  The first floppy is
> > a self-contained boot/root disk.  It contains both the
> > kernel and the root filesystem.  It boots the kernel
> > (using lilo) and runs the root filesystem in a ramdisk.
> > /etc/rc then creates a second ramdisk, mounts it at
> > /usr/X11R6, and loads the contents of the second floppy
> > into it.  The second floppy is optional.  Instead of
> > inserting it, you can press CTRL-C and BL3 will run
> > normally (except it will not have X, links or modules).
>
> That is very useful to know.  We have been repeatedly booting from floppies 
> to test pcmcia and could skip the second floppy and just use a separate one 
> with the six modules, which would be faster to boot.
>
> So Bl3 can be used as a 1-floppy linux without support for CD-ROM, pcmcia, 
> network, modem, serial or parallel ports, or html.  Excellent for a rescue 
> disk.
>
> With just the first disk, you should be able to use BL3 in 8MB RAM, but the 
> second would require a total of 12 MB?   I have a laptop with 8MB and will 
> try that shortly.

When told to insert disk 2 and press Enter I pressed Ctrl-C.  Nothing 
happened.  My partner reminded me that this is one of two computers that 
need an external keyboard and I pressed the OTHER Ctrl-C and it told me to 
press Enter to login.  Worked perfectly.

I then did df and noticed I have 2MB RAM free to run programs in.
I am assuming that the first disk was 100% full which is why the modules 
got put onto the second disk.  I would like to have some of them on the 
first disk:

slhc  7K
ppp   29K
parport 13K
parport_pc 11K
plip 13K
lp  10K

This adds to 83K

I notice that the first disk does contain:
24K of man pages pertaining to X programs
51K of X programs (39K swm, 4K mgp, 8K games)
14K microcom
TOTAL 89K

How would I go about switching the 83K of modules from disk 2 to disk 1, 
and switching the man pages and X programs (and if another 7K is needed 
also microcom) from disk 1 to disk 2, or would Steven be willing to 
rearrange the two disks so that the first one does not load X-related 
programs (which cannot be used without the X files from disk 2 anyway) but 
instead loads modules needed to go online so as to send/receive mail, 
telnet, wget or ftpput (which programs I think are on the first disk). 
One could then even telnet to sdf.lonestar and run three browsers.

My friends would be really impressed if I could just stick one disk and an 
external modem into their computer and do all this, especially the ones 
who think a 5G hard drive is barely enough for wordprocessing.  Of course 
2 disks is also pretty impressive.