Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:
> I shrank usbcam.gz to 5MB so it would fit onto my Smartmedia card which is
> nearly full of photos.
>
> First I was able to chroot to bl3mini, which I had designed for booting
> like BL2, but from one floppy disk.  That worked fine.
>
> I then rebooted and mounted the memory card (mount /dev/sda1 /usb) and
> cd'ed to the /usbcam directory and an ls gave me not the bl3mini file but
> a lot of garbage which I cannot find any way to get rid of:
>
> ?@.?? @       get inte.rfa otocol w.ron??:?????.???
>
> endpoin.t i   augsepoc.tno lation.ata t: %s?.vcu?4???v??.?=?
>
> and much more similar.
>
> I tried to
> rm -r *
> rm:  invalid option --

cd ..; rm -r usbcam

It probably found a file called or containing '--' and is interpreting
it as an option.

Or 'rm -r -- *'. This is supposed to be supported by GNU rm,
not sure about busybox.

> rm -r usbcam
> rm:  directory 'usbcam' is write protected:  descent into it anyway?
> Enter
> Nothing happened.

I think it's expecting you to answer Y or N.

> I don't want to delete all the photos.  How do I get rid of this corrupted
> image file?  Am I seeing the name of one big file?

Are you unmounting and giving the disks plenty of time to sync up
before you unplug them? This is not normal behavior for flash disks.

> I now have a 5MB usbcam5 (which should gzip to about 2.5MB again) which
> contains the netpbm documentation, but nothing for dealing with pcx, bmp,
> png, or tiff files, just gif, jpeg, and p?m, which I can put onto a zip
> disk and use if I modify David's 1-floppy USB boot linux to work with
> parport zip drives.  Does that kernel support imm.o and ppa.o?

Yes, in fact I think I distributed them with an earlier version of
linux-usb.tar.gz.

> I am leery of trying to put any more linux files onto the memory cards.
> Maybe it is time to give up and just lug along a laptop computer (once we
> get zgv to work on them).  Or learn to use whatever libraries put into
> their Window XP computers for image editing, if anything.

As long as you're using a GUI, try Irfanview. Odd name, but it is
a nice free lightweight image processor.

David