Other Help Topics :: hacking DSL from another OS
I normally use Debian Gnu/Linux, but have gotten fed up at times with how applications tend to pull in all sorts of extra libraries and end up taking up several megabytes. I fully realize that my hardware can handle many more programs easily, but I have found that I, too, have developed a distaste for software bloat. I certainly like the way the people at Damn Small Linux think, and would love to switch over to this operating system. My hardware, however, has different ideas.
My computer is a Dell Vostro laptop, and I have to disable several types of hardware detection just to get DSL to boot successfully. Even then, however, my computer usually freezes on shutdown. I have also tried DSL-N, which cures most of these issues. I have one problem, however, in both varients of DSL; my SATA hard drive fails to be detected.
I assume that these problems stem from the kernel that is used in DSL, and that I will need to set up a remastering environment to upgrade the kernel. My issue is this: all the documentation that I have found talks about remastering DSL from within a running instance of DSL, but I need to do this from a second OS, the Debian installation that I mentioned. How should I go about this? I expect to have to drop in a new custom kernel; where should I place the kernel, modules, and initrd to be sure that they will work properly? By the way, I do know about the kernel patch for DSL.
You should be able to load SATA in DSL 4+ using the sata cheatcode. If you read through the forums, you'll also see that there's talk about moving to 2.6 kernel in the very near future. I have a 2.4.36 kernel packaged (for my hard drive install) and I did a quick remaster, but wifi is broken in it. DSL has just about wrung all it can out of 2.4.
It is recommended to do inside DSL, because remastering DSL requires the cloop module and tools.
Of course under Debian it's no problem, apt-get them.
Or utilitize virtualization.
original here.