USB booting :: Making a custom DSL on USB drive



I don't have a copy of the newer style DSL embedded handy, but I thought that the qemu harddisk and mydsl=xxx stuff was already taken care of inside the defualt windows.bat file

You can doublecheck this by opening the file in Wordpad and take a look at it.  There should be a reference to some kind of qemu or harddisk append boot parameter and also a mydsl=xxx reference.

If not, you need to fix this yourself.  If mydsl=hdb doesn't work, then try the other syntax and see what happens.
Quote (cbagger01 @ April 21 2005,12:28)
I don't have a copy of the newer style DSL embedded handy, but I thought that the qemu harddisk and mydsl=xxx stuff was already taken care of inside the defualt windows.bat file

You can doublecheck this by opening the file in Wordpad and take a look at it.  There should be a reference to some kind of qemu or harddisk append boot parameter and also a mydsl=xxx reference.

If not, you need to fix this yourself.  If mydsl=hdb doesn't work, then try the other syntax and see what happens.

The Qemu line in the copy of dsl-windows.bat shipped in dsl-embedded-1.0.1.zip at the time of writing looks like this:

START qemu\qemu.exe -L qemu/  -enable-audio -localtime
-kernel linux24
-initrd minirt24.gz
-hda KNOPPIX/knoppix
-hdb qemu/harddisk
-append "qemu sb=0x220,5,1,1 frugal quiet"

[Line breaks added to aid comprehension]

One of my questions to the DSL maintainer(s) [RobertsS?] was going to be whether it would do any harm to ship this file with an appropriate MYDSL entry already in the -append, even if there were no .dsl file to be re-installed, to save neophytes struggling and maybe dismissing DSL as 'broken'?

It turns out that the value of 'xxx', for me, is indeed 'hdb'.

Other sources of information on the web and in these forums have suggested mydsl=harddisk; mydsl=/dev/hdb; mydsl=/mnt/hdb. None of these worked for me in the context of booting a Qemu virtual machine hosted in Windows.

The -append argument in my batch file now reads -

-append "qemu sb=0x220,5,1,1 frugal quiet mydsl=hdb lang=uk"

and both the changes have the expected effect. (But I'll be back later to ask about zoneinfo files.... )

Thanks to all who have helped, esp. CBagger. Perhaps the outcome could be documented. [Or if it is there already, made clearer and the misleading information removed  :-)  ]

DeeJay
Quote
It turns out that the value of 'xxx', for me, is indeed 'hdb'


This will work if your not using ther 5-way install, this should also work:
mydsl=harddisk
And this works with all boots look here
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....arddisk

Edit: Sorry everyone as roberts pointed out this is for syslinux.cfg and bios boot you are right in using hdb in the .bat and .sh files
What would I have to do to save preferences, like if I changed by desktop background (somehow) and wanted it to stay that way.

I have another computer in the house that I would like to boot into with my regular preferences/settings loaded everytime, if possible.
I see some confusion here.

When running 5way, i.e., embedded-dsl, then the shared virtual drive device is specified by:

1. When inside Qemu the device is referred to as hdb
2. When running natively from BIOS the device is referred to as harddisk

Both backup and mydsl as well as other boot time options refer to the device and not the mount point..

Both Qemu and Native mount the shared drive device as /mnt/hdb

The default location for downloading mydsl extensions is /tmp  This is true across all versions of DSL.

Currently embedded dsl mounts the shared drive device as root only access.
This is what I will change in the next version of DSL. Then it should be simple to download the extensions directly into the shared drive.

It should have user dsl write access as it, the shared drive device, is embedded and not in anyway belongs to the host computer, as typically the real hard drive are.
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