Damn Small Linux - Not!

Keeper of the Grove · Joined: 07 May 2006 Posts: 9 Location: Your Mother's house

Hello all, I have found something I find very weird. I can boot my usb stick fine on a computer restart, but I cannot boot it under qemu. On a whim I grabbed the old 50 mb dsl linux24 and minirt24.gz changed the names to linux and minirt.gz and tried to boot under qemu. I got a few warnings about modules, but it booted fine. The weird thing is that it came up with the [b]Old 50mb DSL[/b] desktop&icons. Why did it do this???
It is most definatly DSL-n KNOPPIX image that I am booting not DSL. Someone help me understand why this happened.

If anyone has gotten a DSL-n usb keydrive to boot under qemu please let me know how you did it - and possibley give me some insight as to what is wrong with mine. Thank you all.

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

If you swapping parts of a dsl pendrive there is a default backup on virtual hard drive hdb which would cause the desktop to appear as it did.

Currently the dsl-n embedded is using the Qemu -cdrom option which would boot to a boot prompt similar to running from the cdrom. There is no virtual/shared hdb on this setup.

I believe the issue of trying to run dsl-n-embedded like dsl-embedded has to do with the virtual harddrive hdb. Maybe too much integration now has surfaced as an issue between Qemu and new kernel.

However, using the -cdrom as prepared in the dsl-n-embedded zip file seems to work fine..

Keeper of the Grove · Joined: 07 May 2006 Posts: 9 Location: Your Mother's house

Yes the "-cdrom dsl-n.iso" on the embedded zip works fine. My intended use for this requires that it be bootable from both qemu and computer startup. I will try and find a solution.
You cannot boot dsl-n.iso from syslinux can you?

Thanks for your reply.

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

To use syslinux would mean that there is a boot floppy image available,
as syslinux has an embedded boot.img file.
But with new kernel and modules being so large that is not the case.

cbagger01 · Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 27

[quote="roberts"]To use syslinux would mean that there is a boot floppy image available,
as syslinux has an embedded boot.img file.
But with new kernel and modules being so large that is not the case.[/quote]

FYI,

It appears that with KNOPPIX 5.01, the developers have come up with some way to boot the linux 2.6.x kernel from 2 floppy disks for people without bootable CDROM drives/BIOS ability.

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like the kerenl is stored on one floppy and the initrd miniroot is stored on the other... An interesting development that might work in future versions of DSL-N