Baslinux mailing list

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

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
> > is it possible to copy the file system that ends up
> > in ram0 after deleting and adding things to a file
> > something like baslinux.gz, copy it to hard drive,
> > split it into two files if needed to get it to floppy
> > disk, and load that with loadlin?
>
> Yes.  Splitting will probably not be necessary.
> The entire root filesystem (compressed) should
> fit on one floppy (with the kernel+loadin on
> another).


Then I think I would need to modify your BL2 2-floppy installation program 
to work with baslinux.gz on disk2 rather than combining part1 and part2.

I will see if I can put together a 2-floppy version of BL3 that fits into 
a 4MB RAMdisk and does not do X, games, pcmcia, or ethernet, for use on 
older 486s with 8MB RAM, that could also be booted with loadlin from HD on 
386s with 3MB RAM and a 30MB hard drive (we have one of these).  These 
don't do pcmcia/ethernet, and with 4-bit color (or even 8-bit color) 
cannot do links2 graphical in XVESA, so I might include svgalib/seejpeg 
with links set to use it. zgv is too large.  Would links2 fit into a 4MB 
ramdisk?  It has the advantage of handling some javascript, and ssl.

My notes say that to copy changes made in BL2:
cat /dev/ram0 > /tmp/ramdisk  (presumably I do this after mounting
the hard drive, and use /tmp on hard drive, for BL3)
cd /tmp
gzip ramdisk  (to ramdisk.gz) and rename it to baslinux.gz, which I could 
then put on the second floppy drive if it is 1.44MB or less.

When I copy BL2 between drives I can use tar and --exclude (in theory, 
anyway).  Should I be excluding /proc somehow when using cat here, since 
this is a running copy of BL3?

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org