Unix on a floppy!! I am very confused!!!!!

[Calum]

Wow! i just discovered, on a CD, that i've got THREE other versions of linux! (well, they are all unix anyway...)
One is Trinux, 3 floppies worth, and one is PicoBSD 0.4, which fits on 1 floppy, and is for dialup networking, and finally, a whopping great 181 Mb distribution of PhatLinux.

Now i'd like to try these out but they're all funny.

Trinux is fine, fromthe floppies, but i want to set up a little partition and add it to lilo, can i? it would seem so. or are there issues?

Now, what about PicoBSD? it comes as a .bin file. i presume i am supposed to copy it to a floppy and boot from it, but it's just too big for a DOS format floppy by a few kb, so what am i supposed to do? i am too dumb to remember (or be able to find out) what utilities exist in a red hat installation that can format floppies as ext2, how do i do this? and will it give me access to more of the space on the disk?
Also, can i also put this on a 2Mb partition and add it to lilo?

Now what about PhatLinux? It's a bunch of stuff that sits in a folder in windows!!! When you run Linux.bat, it reboots yr computer into linux, no dodgy running on top of windows seems like, but can't i put this on a seperate partition and add it to lilo too? will it have to be a DOS partition? or can it be ext 2 or 3 if i want?

Okay, really the only question i want answered here is how do i format a floppy as ext2? i can figure out the rest by trial and error myself, but i just wanted to tell you about my new linux finds!
thanks dudes and dudettes!

[Master of Reality]

In KDE there is a program called Kfloppy which can format a floppy as Ext.2, i dont know how to do this from the console.

[ April 13, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality ]

[Calum]

i remember seeing that now you mention it, although my kde keeps going belly up (it's version 1.1 so i'm giving up on it till i can get 3.0)
thanks for that! although i am still looking for a console way to do it!  

[Master of Reality]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
i remember seeing that now you mention it, although my kde keeps going belly up (it's version 1.1 so i'm giving up on it till i can get 3.0)
thanks for that! although i am still looking for a console way to do it!    

KDE 3.0 is freakin amazing, i'm using it now. It is kick-ass.
http://www.angelfire.com/ri2/42/images for screenshots of my desktop

[Calum]

i'll try that, ta, in the meantime i tried adding the other 3 OSs to lilo, but with no luck.
Trinux doesn't have a valid boot signature, or something. It boots fine from the floppies, but not if i make a partition and add it to /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf, i remembered to run lilo after i had edited these! (something i forgot last time i did this!)

Anyway, that's what i get for Trinux and for PicoBSD and PhatLinux is one of those loadlin.exe things. it sits in a folder on yr windows side, then you run linux.bat, and it supposedly reboots into linux. I got a kernel panic the first time i tried this, so fuck it. i am not too bothered at having a fat32 running linux system when the one i already have is okay.

Now PicoBSD is giving me gip. I formatted a floppy using kfloppy, to ext2 format, but it's still only 1.38Mb in size... and this .bin file is definitely 1.41Mb. It just won't go!
maybe i have to run this bin file in some way possibly from DOS to install it.
That's not a question btw, but if you do happen to know, it would be nice for me to find out!
I'll keep plugging away at it!

addendum:
 

quote:PicoBSD install
I have prepared a PicoBSD image
containing bridge, router and ipfw.
All you need to do is to download the above image file (1.44MB),
dump it to a formatted floppy using "dd" or equivalent command,
and use that floppy to boot the machine acting as a bridge or router.
You can then enable bridging and ipfw with commands like

Code: [Select]

I just found the above on the good old internet (using google of course!) so maybe i should look into this dd thing quicksmart...

[ April 14, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[Nobber]

Spank me roundly (if you must) for encouraging the use of Windows software, but WinImage contains a tool that allows you to format floppies to non-standard sizes, some greater than the standard 1.44MB.

[Calum]

thanks for that! i actually found a similar linux program on download.com (not sure what it's called) that does up to 1.88Mb raw space, but i'm also a bit confused as to how i get PicoBSD from the form of a .bin file to be a bootable floppy, also i'd like to add it to the hard drive and boot it from there, but i am clueless as to how.

Now my linux side is in a caffuffle for the next week or so, this BSD thing is on the back burner, but ta for adding that anyway, i might get that program just the same. you never know when these things might come in handy!

[voidmain]

How big is the *.bin file? I'll bet it's around 1.44MB no?  It's probably a disk image in which case:

dd bs=8192 if=floppyimage.bin of=/dev/fd0

"dd" is a very powerful utility useful for many many things but very commonly used to create floppy images and write them back to disk. Floppy images are just sector for sector copy of data from a floppy to a file, same with *.ISO CD images. You can use "dd" to create an ISO image by:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=mycd.iso

And if the floppy was bootable when the image was created, it will be bootable when you use "dd" to recreate the floppy. Do a "man dd" for more info.

[Calum]

oh! thank you for that! i'll do that in a couple of days, after i install mandrake 8. my linux side is all to buggery right now, so i'm waiting till wednesday when mandrake arrives, i'll still have to deal with my cruddy SiS630 video card though    , but i digress, ta for the info...