Baslinux mailing list

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

> > > So Bl3 can be used as a 1-floppy linux
> >
> > Yes.
> >
> > > With just the first disk, you should be able to
> > > use BL3 in 8MB RAM,
>
> > Maybe, maybe not.  IIRC the routine that loads the
> > second floppy creates the second ramdisk before asking
> > you to insert the second floppy.  This alone might crash
> > a system with only 8mb RAM.
The second RAMdisk is only 2.5MB.


> I put disk 1 into a computer which only has 8MB RAM, hit Ctrl-C instead of 
> Enter, and it worked perfectly.  Have you tried this?  I have only one such 
> 8MB computer.  There were 2MB free.  I ran only a few very small programs: 
> df and du and ls and less.

> > Good luck.  If it does work, do 'free' to see how much
> > RAM is left and 'df' to see whether the second ramdisk
> > (at /usr/X11R6) is there.
>
> I did the experiment before getting this information from you.
> df told me 51% of the space was use and I had about 2MB free.
> There was a second line there which I did not read, as I got interested in 
> looking for a way to put modules on the first disk.

Free - 
Total memory:   7032K
Used:           6088K
Free:            944K

This implies the BL3 kernel uses about 1MB RAM and the two RAMDISKs and 
the 'free' program use 6MB RAM, right?

df -

/dev/ram0 - 4005K of which 2060 available and 51% used
/dev/ram1 = 2515K of which 2502 available and 13 used (/usr/X11R6)

This implies that the two RAMDISKS use 6.5MB RAM.

Where did I go wrong on the arithmetic?

Anyway, I have about .5-1M RAM left to run programs in, which is not 
impossible but it would be more helpful not to create the second ramdisk. 
Maybe I could just unmount it?  I will read Steven's next email now.

BL2 2-floppy worked better on this computer.  It only creates the second 
4MB ramdisk if the computer has 12MB or more RAM.  Perhaps BL1 install 
routine could be modified to do the same, otherwise it would be nice to 
have a 1-floppy version of BL1 without X or pcmcia or ethernet or cd-rom 
modules.  The 486s we have with 8MB RAM or less don't have pcmcia or 
cd-rom hardware.   I suppose we could install to HD instead.

The first floppy has 40K free and was formatted with 1433 blocks (plus 
whatever is used to set up the file system).


Sindi