Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, sindi keesan wrote:

> We have DOS USB mass storage working (two files in config.sys) with two
> USB cameras (CF and XD) and one card reader.  We have a 64MB CF card and a
> 16MB XD card, which I think we could partition to make a baslin directory.
> How would we go about making a DOS boot floppy for BL3-on-camera to
> impress our friends with (and also maybe to even edit images within the
> camera using netpbm)?

First, you'd wanna confirm that BL can deal with the USB thingy as mass 
storage. I guess you already know it can using David's 2.4.31 kernel. If 
you want to have the capability of dealing with more hardware on the host 
machine, you'd probably want to use Steven's BL 3.40 kernel--since he 
seems to have compiled all the modules (another option: DamnSmallLinux 
uses the 2.4.31 kernel too (I used DSL for my project], so you could steal 
modules from them to use with David's kernel). Once you confirmed that, 
you'd have to create and ext2 filesystem on the USB mass-storage device 
and get a working BL install onto it. Maybe you could to that last step by 
hooking up the camera to a computer where you have a BL install and 
booting from David's floppy, then copying all the stuff from the BL 
install over to the camera partition (cp -a is what you'd wanna use, I 
think). Then, make a FreeDOS floppy and put loadlin and the kernel on it. 
Next, get the initrd from the Runt distro (I can send you a copy, or post 
one somewhere) and do surgery on it. Basically, you mount it as a loop 
device under Linux and pull out the modules he's put in /lib and replace 
them with copies of modules that match the kernel you wanna run. Or, if 
you're brave and have the proper geek-factor, you can create your own 
initrd from scratch: I've never done this, so can't give advice. Steven 
and David have though, and could probably do so just as fast or faster 
than it would take me to perform surgery on Runt's initrd. My method is 
more of a kludge, but it's the only one I've been capable enough to 
accomplish so far. Put the initrd on the FreeDOS boot disk, boot from it, 
and issue loadlin kernel-name initrd=initrd-name root=/dev/sd(USB drive 
device designation). It should boot you into the system. It works for me. 
Be aware that they advise against using flash media for OS installs, since 
they measure the life of these things in (comparatively low) read-write 
cycles and a running OS has to do alot of reading from and writing to the 
disk.

Booting a bare system with just the kernel (and whatever is compiled into 
it) and the USB modules from the relevant kernel would get you a working 
Linux running from the camera, I would guess. You might need to load a few 
modules to do anything useful from there, though. It would be alot more 
manual than what I did, which involved using DSL with its 
hardware-detection, module-loading capabilities.

> We could try putting BL3 into a 20MB CF partition (ext2) and chrooting to
> it from the linux USB boot floppy disk.  I don't think any of our computer
> boot from USB drives - do the newer ones?

Newer machines do boot from USB devices, yes. On newer machines, this 
obviates the need for the boot floppy I've described above.

> Can partition managers shrink XP partitions to make space for ext2?

Yes. If the partition is FAT32, there are alot of options both on Linux 
and DOS. I've used QTParted for shrinking NTFS partitions. Probably its 
command-line counterpart Parted does the same.

James