Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

James Miller wrote:
>
> 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.

Stephen got delilinux (with linux 2.2.26) to recognize his ipod. I have
been unable to get any usb storage device to work on 2.2.26. I did
get a floppy drive working on 2.2.16, but my usb key froze the PC
when it was inserted on 2.2.16 or 2.2.26.

> 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).

If you don't mind wasting about 300k on a firewall and a few
other luxuries, you can just use the latest Slackware 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.

umsdos is also a (slow) possibility.

> 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.

sindi has modified the initrd that I made for booting BL3 loop from
a ZIP disk. So she should not have too much trouble with this.

> 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.

I thought that was the first generation of flash disks. I also thought that
the limit only applied to writes, not reads. Anyway, if you modify BL3 a
little bit, you can get it to boot into ro mode. And BL3 is so small that
this should not be a concern.

> 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.

You can put USB modules into /etc/rc and you will not need to do any
manual configuration. This will waste a little memory, but it can't be
any more than all DSL wastes by running hotplug and other daemons.

> > 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.

I don't know how to put a bootloader onto a key drive. Do you? I
guess I can always RTFM.

> > 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.

parted doesn't do ntfs partitions. But ntfsresize does, and qtparted
uses ntfsresize. BE CAREFUL! I once tried to resize a NTFS partition
with another Linux distribution, and it wiped out everything on that
partition. Fortunately, I had backups.

David