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  • From: James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] BL loopback version in Windows XP command window
  • Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 14:07:04 -0600 (CST)

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




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