Frugal install?Forum: HD Install Topic: Frugal install? started by: grajohnt Posted by grajohnt on Mar. 12 2004,01:59
Here's the situation:I have a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 (486DX-100, 8Mb RAM, and a 180Mb HD) that I'd like to put some flavor of linux on. DSL looks like a good choice (other options are smaller, like jailbait, but probably involve too much modification). The HD is a Type III PCMCIA card. Here's the plan: 1) Pop the 180Mb card into my laptop (with XP). 2) Boot laptop with something like Knoppix (this works, recognizes the PCMCIA HD) 3) Install DSL onto the PCMCIA hard drive I know how to do this if I were installing it on the laptop, but I'm not sure about doing it on the PCMCIA HD. Can I use some variant of the 'frugal install' that I can't seem to find directions for? (link anyone?) Will I have major problems running LILO and trying to convince it to NOT modify my laptop? Would anyone be willing to point me to (or write) explicit instructions? Thanks in advance. Posted by grajohnt on Mar. 20 2004,02:54
OK, well, I went ahead and tried to install DSL on the PCMCIA HD for the fujitsu using my laptop...Made the 3 linux partitions... Ran frugal_install.sh This all ran fine and smoothly - no errors. The final result? 1) The PCMCIA HD that I did the frugal_install on won't boot the fujitsu (OS not found). 2) The laptop MBR is now FUBAR'd, so now it won't boot into windows. (Fixing this now). (Yes, I installed to the PCMCIA HD, not to the laptop HD) Not exactly sucessful. Is there any way to 'force' frugal_install.sh to not run LILO? Is there a better way to do this? Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 20 2004,18:38
Instead of doing a Frugal Install, try manually doing a Poor Man's install.Copy the contents of the CD over to your C:\ drive so that C:\KNOPPIX contains your CDROM's \KNOPPIX directory. Then create a boot floppy disk per the instructions. Boot from the floppy and it will find that C:\KNOPPIX contents and boot from there. Posted by grajohnt on Mar. 20 2004,19:07
Unfortunately, I don't have a floppy for this machine - that's part of the problem.According to the LILO FAQ, I can run LILO on one machine for a drive to be installed in another. I think I will try this... Is there anywhere on-line that documents the poor man's install? Searching the archive doesn't really turn anything up... Posted by roberts on Mar. 20 2004,19:49
Poorman usually requires a boot floppy. That is why I wrote frugal. Since you already have the system installed on the pcmcia card all you need is the boot loader. You are right about lilo being able to write to another disk. The frugal script is just text. Take a look and hack it replacing the lilo with the drive letter of the memory card as it appears in the other machine. Cut and paste out that section and try it. Good luck, let us know your results.
Posted by grajohnt on Mar. 21 2004,14:23
OK - thanks for the replies guys...I changed a few lines in the frugal install script, in order to get LILO to run 'correctly'. (I can give you the changes, if you're interested). However, while booting DSL, I get a bunch of 'Out of memory' errors.... Since I only have 8MB of RAM, is there a good set of boot options to use? Nothing appears obvious in the Knoppix cheat codes. I am not using 'toram', since I assume I don't have enough RAM. I'm much closer, but not quite there yet! Posted by roberts on Mar. 21 2004,18:29
Did you try:boot: knoppix 2 See if it will boot to text mode single user. You said you made three parttions. I am assuming one is swap. Is your swap recognized? I am also assuming that 180MB pcmcia hard drive is not like flash memory drive. Because swap would kill the flash memory device. I am amazed that your notebook will boot off pcmcia slot! Posted by grajohnt on Mar. 21 2004,22:37
Yeah, I tried that...something likeknoppix 2 noscsi mem=8M No, it's not a flash card - it's an ATA hard disk, in the form factor of a Type III PCMCIA card. The Fujitsu is an old pen/tablet PC, and the only spot for a HD is this PCMCIA slot, so it's designed to boot off of it. It also has two other PCMCIA slots for other cards. It sees the three partitions, but doesn't appear to recognize anything as swap (but it might not be getting far enough?) Just for completeness, my three partitions are 1) 80M ext2 = root, 2) 32M swap (ran mkswap on the other laptop), and 3) ~70M ext2 data. Everything is fine up until "Accessing KNOPIX CDROM at /dev/hda1"...then on the "Setting paths..." line, it all goes to heck. I get multiple "Out of memory: killed process xxx" errors, and it never actually boots - sometimes it ends up with "INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel." I get the feeling I'm missing something obvious... Posted by roberts on Mar. 21 2004,23:03
This is what I think is happening to you. Normally, the pcmcia support is not included in the boot floppy image. For example see the mesage under laptops booting from floppy to pcmcia memory device that was recently posted. Now your machine's bios can boot from pcmcia. The bios hands control to the boot.img file. But then the boot.img, which is really just the boot floppy image, has no support for pcmcia, i.e., card manager services, there it bombs on you. Not to simple to fix. As the boot floppy to sucessfully boot into pcmcia memory is really two floppies. You have no floppy drive. You would have to somehow remaster the iso to include a super large boot.img that would include card manager! Anyway, that is what I think is happening to you.
Posted by grajohnt on Mar. 22 2004,00:27
That seems very reasonable. One of the guys who installed FreeBSD/Debian (here: < http://www.the-labs.com/Stylistic/1000.html > ) on this machine used a kernel with PCMCIA drivers.I'll check into using the flash card version... Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. |