Baslinux mailing list

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

On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, James Miller wrote:

> 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

The 3.40 kernel will not do the camera or card readers. SW10.2 uses kernel 
2.4.31 so I might be able to use modules from there. Someone sent us a 
copy that should be here soon. We don't have the latest DSL - would one 
from 2 years ago use 2.4.31?

> 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

I already did something similar to an external scsi drive and can plug 
that into any computer with a scsi card and boot it from another linux 
with scsi support.  I think David's 1-floppy USB disk does scsi but I am 
losing track.  I know his larger kernel has it built-in for the hard disk.

> think). Then, make a FreeDOS floppy and put loadlin and the kernel on it.

The kernel would have to have USB support built in or use the initrd with 
USB support from the 1-floppy USB camera/storage disk, maybe somewhat 
modified.  Would it not be simpler just to boot that 1-floppy boot disk, 
mount the CF card in the camera, and then chroot to it, with the 2.4.31 
modules on the CF card?

> 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

I would use their initrd's as models if I did this.  Or just boot with 
David's floppy disk that already has the initrd for scsi_mod and sd_mod 
and ohci/ehci, and the usb-storage module in modules that I can insmod, 
then mount the camera and chroot to it so I can use a more complete linux 
to edit images.  My partner thinks this is a really clever idea, to carry 
linux around in the camera.  It does require that we find a camera with 
floppy disk to plug into, and one with enough RAM to edit images.  Our 
24MB RAM laptop can rotate a 640 resolution image 90 degrees but crashes 
on larger ones without a swap file (and is slow).  Would linux run as fast 
from a camera/CF card as from hard drive?  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
/dev/sda4

You don't need a 'rw'?

> 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.

It will wear out the CF card, you mean?  We would also want a power 
adaptor instead of running off two or four AA's.

Thanks for the warning.  This CF card cost more than we have spent on all 
other computer equipment combined for several years.  ($16).

> 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

We already have something better than this on the floppy disk, which has 
'less' and 'e3' and 'zgv'.  And a longer life cycle.

> 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 have a SW91 Live CD.  We could learn to make a BL bootable CD that 
would not require a floppy drive.

> > 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.

We have not even succeeded in booting from a DOS scsi drive.
One computer with scsi card won't recognize the drive in DOS, the other 
recognizes it but won't boot - I did put the system on it and set BIOS to 
boot SCSI, A, C.  Gets stuck on verifying something.  Maybe I have to set 
it to be 'active' or 'bootable' in addition.

One of our better comupters has bad IDE controllers and I was trying to 
switch to scsi hard drives and CD-ROM drive instead.

> > 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

So someone with XP could make space for linux on the main drive.