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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] BL on CF IDE drive
  • Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:37:13 +0000 (UTC)

Someone is coming over in 8 hours for help installing linux to a 4GB CF IDE drive (goes into a PCMCIA slot) on a 133MHz laptop with 48MB RAM (does not want to pay for more RAM even if it can hold more).
The idea is to use minimal power so as to prolong battery life.
Intended use is only wireless internet, with an orinoco card (needs 2.4 kernel). I know wireless cards use a fair amount of power to generate the radio signal.

48MB would probably run Seamonkey or Firefox so I plan to put on BL2 with glibc 2.3.6 update (by copying files from my laptop, to the drive inserted into it).

Can we make a lilo boot floppy to boot to this drive? Pcmcia modules including ide-cs.o need to be loaded before the drive can even be recognized.

Another option is to use a DOS boot floppy and load BL from DOS with loadlin, but I would need help making an initfs.gz with the pcmcia drivers. In the next 8 hours.

I have the BL3 loop initfs.gz as a model. Do I replace the contents of linuxrc with instructions to load pcmcia modules? Do I need to include /etc/pcmcia/config and /etc/pcmcia/start as well, and run start from linuxrc, then mount /dev/hde1 (or whatever it identifies as)? Have mount in /bin and /bin on the path (in linuxrc).

Is there a better initfs.gz to use as a model some place?

Can these cards even be partitioned to fat and ext2 (two partitions)?
Loop linux does not work with kernel 2.4 (read-only file system for some reason) so we cannot use just a fat filesystem.

Other suggestions?

The puppy linux boot floppy has drivers for booting from CF drive (using grub). I don't understand grub, but maybe there is something useful to be learned from it anyway.

If this works, he would have a portable linux usable in any laptop with pcmcia and floppy drive. We have a 16MB CF card and pcmcia adaptor that could be used similarly. Other live linuxes boot from USB flash drive but we have no computers new enough to do that.

We also have an order for a laptop for typing notes at a meeting and printing them (on a Tandy dot-matrix printer), which could be BL3 with the 'wp' (pico-based) wordprocessor. The laptop we have has no floppy drive so we might set it up with pcmcia modem and she can mail herself files too. (Is there some easy way to do file transfer between computers via modem and phone cable instead?). We don't have crossover ethernet cables or serial or parallel transfer cables to spare, but could also offer her a hub and two straight ethernet cables, but she would need to learn to run httpd or ftpd to access the files from Windows. Other ideas?

Sindi Keesan




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