Baslinux mailing list

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

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
> > This is a five year old computer.  Are there any plans
> > to keep BL updated to support anything that new
>
> No.  Every new feature (like USB) makes it bigger.
> BasicLinux is meant to be basic, not fully-featured.
> I am happy for things like USB to be optional modules
> or add-ons.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven

Since we have not been able to get USB working with BL2 (yet - maybe 
busybox insmod is the problem), we attempted to put SW91 onto our friend's 
120GB hard drive which only let us format 48GB, but cfdisk says there are 
no free sectors.  Apparently we could partition the entire 120GB but 
not format it on this computer, without a BIOS upgrade.

Is there some linux tool that we can use to shrink the first partition 
that has Win98 on it, similar to PQMagic (which won't work on this size 
hard drive)?  If necessary we can start over and reinstall Win98 but I 
hate working with it.  We can't use any DOS tools except from within 
Windows - would DOS partition resizer work on this size drive?

Maybe we should let our friend first put XP on here in 40GB, which he is 
thinking of doing (I can't imagine why) and then put on linux.


I am thinking of putting SW91 (for reference in cases like this) on my 
newest computer with the 10GB drive.  Make three linux partitions - one 
for BL2, one for SW91, one shared partition with image and sound and other 
stored files, accessible from either OS. 200MB BL3, 2GB BL2, 3GB SW91, 5GB 
storage? I can make a swap file later if needed, in the 5GB.

I will also put the working IDE CD-RW drive in here because I need 700MB 
free space to copy CDs through.  The scsi drive in my other computer will 
write 80% of any CD, no matter what the size.  Our Windows friend said he 
has one that does the same thing, so it is not something stupid I am doing 
(as was the case where I set the HD to go off after 10 min of no use and 
readcd did not count as use).  His CD-RW is external and mine was 
originally packaged that way but I plugged it into a bay.  Do external 
drives need to be treated differently in order to write the whole CD, or 
is this something reparable?  I could not find it on the web.

Does this seem like a reasonable way to partition?

Luckily linux can be recopied instead of reinstalled, after repartitioning 
and reformatting.

All of the links that I followed to DOS USB boot disk are broken but 
supposedly Windows 98 hidusb.sys and usbuhci.sys will run a mouse and 
keyboard in DOS, which should let us use loadlin with SW91 and eventually 
BL2 with SW81 kernel/modules on a USB-only computer.