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baslinux - Re: [BL] Wireless in BL2 (actually it's more about kernels and such, but whatever)

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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Wireless in BL2 (actually it's more about kernels and such, but whatever)
  • Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 06:05:55 +0000 (UTC)

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.





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