quirky
Group: Members
Posts: 7
Joined: Jan. 2006 |
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Posted: Jan. 11 2006,13:24 |
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Hi,
DSL works great on my aging 64Mb 450Mhz laptop - I was really surprised 1. that it ran at all 2. how well it did run! far better than the HD installed Redmondware. The one problem is with the wireless network card: I have a ralink chipset card and my wireless network uses WPA. Now, this card has GPL'd drivers (rt2500) that work fine once set up, but they are completely incompatible with DSL's SMP-enabled kernel. insmod'ing the rt2500 module is ok, but when you ifconfig an IP address to the network interface you get a system hang. It is a known problem, even on single CPU/non hyperthreaded machines, and the only solution is to use a kernel without SMP. Because of this, I'd really like to compile a DSL kernel configured without SMP (the target machine is single CPU anyway).
I've followed the various knoppix remastering howtos and have been able to reproduce a regular remastered DSL iso with minor changes. I've downloaded the DSL 2.4.31 kernel source and dsl.config. So now I've got my chroot'd "master" environment with the kernel sources in /usr/src as expected. The questions I have are:
1. How do I install gcc-2.95, make, etc into this chroot environment? Do I have to physically download more stuff from the net or can I use .dsl files that come included in the dsl-2.0.iso? I'm a bit confused about .dsl vs .deb in DSL actually (my other machine has Ubuntu installed, so I understand deb files ok, .dsl is a bit of a mystery)
2. Do I have to compile from within DSL or can I do it from a different distribution? My guess is that it doesn't matter, as long as I compile with DSL's gcc-2.95.
3. What would be the steps to compile the kernel? Obviously there'd be Apply Knoppix patch, Use "make menuconfig" to remove SMP support, but what would come next? "make all"? What files would be generated and where would they go?
I've compiled my own custom 2.6.14 Ubuntu kernel using the Debian make-kpkg utility, so I know the basics. But make-kpkg hides the details of where kernel modules need to go and so on - it just produces a new linux_image.deb file that you can install with dpkg. e.g. do I have to regenerate any other files manually?
Perhaps all this would be easier with a HD install, but I've been told that I can't install Linux on the target laptop, despite the stability problems Win98 gives. My plan is to use DSL, use 'ssh -X' to connect to my Ubuntu PC and use the laptop as a kind of thin client, and a remastered live CD would do the trick. Plus it sounds cool "Oh, yeah, I use DSL with a custom kernel..." 
thanks in advance!
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