Baslinux mailing list

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

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, David Moberg wrote:

> David Moberg wrote:
> > I copied it to my memory card, gunzipped and chrooted into it.
> > It seems to work fine. I still think that something is wrong with
> > your card, your drivers, or the way you copied the file over.

My Compact Flash memory card is formatted for DOS, is your Sandisk drive?

> I have successfully booted Sindi's miniBL3 (usbcam.gz) from
> a USB 'key' drive. I used the usbcam.gz for the root filesystem,
> the bzImage.431 for a kernel, and syslinux as the bootloader.
> This process worked with a 128MB Sandisk Cruzer Mini drive.
> It should also be easy to modify the blppaz initrd and use that
> with this boot method to boot BL3 loop from a USB storage
> device.
>
> I chose syslinux as the bootloader because it appears to be the
> most supported for booting from a USB drive. First I installed
> syslinux (from source) and read the documentation. According
> to README.usbkey, you need to execute two commands, which
> wipe the disk and prepare it to boot.
>
> mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sda 0 64 32
> syslinux /dev/sda4
>
> mkdiskimage took several minutes, likely because I used a
> USB 1.1 (12Mbit/s) PC.After these steps, I mounted sda4 and
> copied usbcam.gz and bzImage.431 (renamed to linux) to the
> disk. Finally, I created a syslinux.cfg:
>
> DEFAULT linux initrd=usbcam.gz ramdisk_size=16384 root=/dev/ram0 rw
>
> This automatically boots kernel 'linux' with initrd 'usbcam.gz'. I
> allowed 16384k (16MB) for the initrd because the usbcam.gz
> appears to be slightly larger than 8mb, uncompressed.

The file system only needed about 5MB but I made usbcam 10MB so people can 
add things to it.  You can copy over the files in it to an 8MB file.
dd if=/dev/zero if=usbcam8 bs=1024 count=8k (I think).

You can also make a 64MB usblinux file and copy a larger file system to it 
including X and Opera.  (insmod loop) and mount -o loop usblinux /mnt then 
using RAMdisk BL2 to copy BL3, mount what you want to copy at /hd, and cd 
/hd, cp -a * /mnt.

Yesterday I posted a slightly smaller netpbm-bl3.tgz (includes gif and pcx 
convertors and replaces double-copies of libraries with one copy plus 
symlink) that can replace what is in usbcam.gz (but I may already have 
deleted the duplicate libraries in the .gz file).   Just copy it on top of 
the old one.

> I unmounted the disk and moved it to a USB2 PC that can boot
> from USB storage. I turned it on and selected 'USB Storage
> Device' as the boot medium. About 15 seconds later, I saw a
> prompt which said something about pressing Ctrl+C to start
> miniBL3. I did press Ctrl+C and then the BL3 was running. I
> looked at two manpages and tried zgv on a photo; everything
> seems to work perfectly.

The Ctrl-C is left over from Steven's 2-floppy BL3.32, which I truncated 
to 1 disk and did not redo completely since Ctrl-C worked (to load his 
first disk without the second one containing X).

So this is a BL3-32 derivative but you can replace the busybox with the 
3.40 1.01 busybox (or my 1.10 version).  The kernel is not any BL3 kernel.

> It should not be too difficult to modify the blppaz initrd to
> boot BL3 loop. It just needs to insert the usb-storage modules
> and look in sda4 or sdb4 for the loop image.
>
> David
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org