Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

I am going through some newish computers given us for various reasons. 
One still reboots randomly after replacing 14 leaky capacitors.  One with 
replaced CPU seems to have a bad IDE controller (I get ide error messages 
while copying large files before a really serious crash).

I got an ECS (2002) mostly working.  I have two the same, and the other 
one works fine except for dead USB and something to do with asynchronous 
vs synchronous which affects newer (post 1995) scanners.

With this one, in DOS the PS/2 keyboard works fine, but in linux (ramdisk, 
loop, ext2, various 2.2 and 2.4 kernels): Timeout:  AT keyboard not 
present? or simply timeout and the keyboard simply refuses to work (I 
cannot log in).  I tried three keyboards that work elsewhere.

So I tried a USB keyboard.

Does the 'big' kernel work with USB keyboard?

The 1-floppy USB disk by David Moberg works with USB keyboard (an icky 
Microsoft ergonomic model) and he has set it up with an initfs.gz that 
loads the usb drivers:  usbcore, usb-ohci (and usb-uhci), keybdev and hid.
(Is keybdev required for USB keyboard?).

Rather than recompile my kernel so it will support a USB keyboard (I have 
not even tested the PS/2 mouse yet), what do I need to put into initfs.gz 
to make it boot using loadlin zimage root=/dev/hdaX initrd=initfs.gz ro 
(or rw for BL3) ?

When gunzipped and mounted -o loop, his initfs.gz has
/DOS (empty)  - modelled on loop BL3 - do I need this?
/proc (empty) - do I need this?
/bin/insmod (and other things - do I need them?)
/dev/console etc. - what do I need to boot with?  hda1 tty*?

/lib/modules/2.4.31/kernel/drivers/usb/* - 
(/lib/modules/2.4.31/misc ought to work just as well)
/lost+found

linuxrc - insmod and some other lines.  What do I need to put into it to 
boot to ext2 with USB keyboard modules loaded first?

How do I go about building one of these?
Do I need to guess at the size of it first?

dd if=zero of=initfs bs=1024 count=1 (1MB file - too big?)

mount -o loop initfs and then create directories and copy to them?

The BL initfs.gz equivalents are not designed for booting to ext2.

Sindi

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