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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] camera linux
  • Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 21:55:41 +0000 (UTC)

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




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