hacking DSL from another OS

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: hacking DSL from another OS
started by: roadnottaken

Posted by roadnottaken on Jan. 24 2008,03:52

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.

Posted by lucky13 on Jan. 24 2008,04:27

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.

Posted by curaga on Jan. 24 2008,08:11

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.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Jan. 24 2008,16:26

Or utilitize virtualization.