Installing Embedded

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: Installing Embedded
started by: mrdamage

Posted by mrdamage on May 14 2005,05:37

Dear All
Love DSL embedded and have installed it to a 20Gig USB hardrive (DSL on a 1 Gig FAT Partition and the other partition is a FAT32 with music on it and other files). How can I access my music files on the rest of the USB hard drive when running DSL? Do I need to use Samba and also where does the ramdisk exist?

Posted by meo on May 14 2005,11:21

Hi mrdamage!

In DSL start mount.app and check how your hd is recognized. Then you just mount the partition where you have the music files and use them.

Have fun,
meo

Posted by mrdamage on May 14 2005,18:49

Hi Meo
Going to give that a go. I think I have a problem with the USB drive. During boot up it say's /dev/ata unknown slave. Also I must have been having a brain storm, asking where the ramdisk exists duh!

Posted by mrdamage on May 14 2005,22:09

Hi Meo

I reformatted the usb drive (1gig to FAT) and the rest to FAT32. I then extracted the DSL embedded files to the 1gig partition and then placed a test file in the other partition to see if I could access it from within DSL. I could mount hda but couldn't mount hdb, so at this stage DSL cannot see the partitions on the usb hard drive. Any ideas or checks that I could do?

Posted by cbagger01 on May 14 2005,23:43

Are you running DSL embedded from MSwindows via QEMU?

If so, your DSL embedded system is unable to see the contents of your USB drive or any other files on your real hard drive.

QEMU is a program that creates a virtual PC or fake PC and runs it from inside a Window in your native operating system.

It works like commercial products called VMWare and Virtual PC.

Your virtual computer is unable to see your real hardware, including the files on the rest of your USB drive.

However, it is possible to get to these files in an indirect way, via Windows network shares.

You can use the "Share as" function inside MS Windows Explorer to "share" your USB drive letter on the Network.

Then, from inside DSL, you can install SAMBA and use it to connect to the network drive and get at your files.

Or you can use the built-in SMBCLIENT program to tranfer files in an FTP-like fashion.

Here is an example:

Go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt and open up a command prompt inside Windows. Then type:

ipconfig

and write down your Windows IP address. Example: 192.168.1.10

then type "Exit" to exit the command prompt.

Then go into DSL and choose Apps -> Net -> smbclient

Then type in:

Domain: anydomainname
Machine: 192.168.1.10
Share: SharedDocs (or replace with your share name)
Name: anyusername
Password: anypassword

and connect

To look at directory type:

ls

To get files type:

get filename

or

mget *.doc

to get all files with doc extension down to your DSL computer, for example

put filename.txt

or

mput *.txt

to send all files with txt extension back to MSWindows computer.

Hope this helps.

Posted by mrdamage on May 15 2005,00:10

Thanks for that. Just trying to get my head round the whole thing. What I'm trying to do is run DSL from the USB drive and have all the data there as well so I can use it at other machines within the school and carry everything around with me and not have to use windows. I've tried the HD install option to the usb drive and then I booted from it (I'm lucky got a new laptop with USB boot option), but it stalls and says I have to do something with root at boot up. Does this seem the right option rather than using the emulator? I've tried the option you mention, but sometimes work at machines that are not connected to the the net so there is no IP address. I just sometimes want to sit and write a few reports and listen to some music that I have on the usb hard drive. If I'm connected to the net the reports erm don't seem to get done!

Posted by cbagger01 on May 16 2005,16:58

You probably need to create a root password after the installation.

HD install will work, but you will need to build some kind of custom boot floppy to get it to work on computers that do not support USB hard drive booting in BIOS.

If you do a frugal or poormans install to your USB hard drive, then you can use the standard DSL USB boot floppy image and get up and running.

Posted by muellerr1 on May 17 2005,14:05

Not that this is exactly related, but one experiment I tried might be useful for you. I used qemu-img.exe to create a 1-gig file, then attached that file to the system on hdd: just add it to your qemu .bat file like hdb (hdd=qemu/myNewImageFile). The drawback is that your files on hdd won't be available to windows then. You can also attach a swap file this way, just format it as swap space from dsl.

I believe that it's possible to partition this file in dsl as well using fdisk.