Please help! Will use DSL in trade for assistance.

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Please help! Will use DSL in trade for assistance.
started by: froggg

Posted by froggg on June 13 2006,01:22

OK, here's my situation: The computer is an old AMD K6 processor running at 300 mhz, I have 128 meg of ram, a 3 gig HD, and a cdrom/burner. I don't want to partition the HD due to the small size, and I like running DSL for some things, and Windoze for others. Also keep this in mind: I'm just getting back into using computers after being away for well over a decade, and quite out of touch on a lot of the terminology, so please make responses very detailed so I understand them. Here's what I want to do. I want to boot DSL with the following at the boot prompt so I don't have to type it in every time: dsl toram dsl vga=normal. I've tried running the mkmydsl script, but get the error message "Operation not permitted. Failed to preserve ownership of" then the file name. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Posted by tedmoore99 on June 13 2006,02:52

Hi Frogg:
I will give it a try. When you say that you do not want to partition your HD, I assume that you want to run a "live CD", which means nothing gets written to your HD and everything runs in ram. If this is true, then you are consigned to having to edit the boot entry at startup each and every time.
The powers that be at dsl have designed a solution to this problem called the "frugal" install. This copies the dsl image to a small partition on your hd (about 50MB). This install creates a boot installer in the master boot record of your hd. Once that has been done, you can modify that boot script any way you want. If that is unsatisfactory, then you can even create a bootable system on a usb thumbdrive, again without touching your harddrive.
Instructions for all of this is on the dsl site.
Hope I helped, enjoy dsl
--Ted

Posted by ubl on June 15 2006,12:39

Or, you could make a DSL CD remaster, set your BIOS to boot from CD and just take the remastered CD out, reboot whenever you need the other operating system.

This is what I do.

Posted by andrewb on June 16 2006,03:40

You can run Windoze & DSl off the one partition. Copy the boot & KNOPPIX directories from the CD to the Windoze partition. Best to do this using DSL if you can boot it from a CD as then you shouldn't get any issues with Windoze changing the capitilization of the directory/file-names.

You can now boot DSL (with the frugal option) either from a DOS prompt using loadlin, or by installing GRUB. I've used this method to update some of my DSL installs. What I can't remember right at the moment is how the partition will be mounted. I think it may get mounted as read-only under /CDROM (although it may only be the /KNOPPIX directory that gets loaded this way. In this case you may need to remount it as rw in order to be able to write to it. You should be able to set up the windows swapfile to be used by DSL as well (I seem to remember a method of doing this from RedHat many years ago).

Sorry I can't be more specific at the moment as I'm away from my machine that has DSL on the HD.