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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] BL loopback version in Windows XP command window
  • Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 03:48:59 +0000 (UTC)

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

Why bother, when I can use your 2.4.31 kernel and initrd? Will that kernel not work with netpbm? I don't think it had ppp support but we don't need to run a full-fledged BL on it. The idea would be to edit photos (crop, rotate, shrink...) and replace the original larger files with smaller ones on the camera, not to go online with the camera. We could do that with a regular 2-floppy BL. Or the friend's Windows.

Is there any reason not to simply boot with syslinux to linux, and chroot instead of booting to DOS and then using loadlin and another initrd to boot to the camera?

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.
I tried that once. It put about 30,000 (maybe only 3000) files into one of my DOS partitions and made it nearly impossible to defrag.


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.

I have not figured out syslinux yet. Maybe there is some way to get a larger kernel into the 1-floppy USB storage boot disk that would accept more modules, put the slhc/ppp modules and zgv onto the camera. Then if the computer we plugged into had a modem or DSL connection, we could connect to the internet via camera and email the photos with linux after editing them. I learned how to plug into a DSL router via USB. How would we use a DSL line from a USB camera, just run udhcpc and telnet (?) to the IP number?


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.

Our flash disk is August 2005. If we boot into ro mode, we can't edit the photos and put them back onto the camera.

I really ought to do taxes before making a linux camera. A card reader camera might be a better idea, it does not need a power adaptor or batteries. It does not take very good photos though. We could carry both.

What else can you run linux on?

David




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