Dual Booting with VERY minimal installs

[voidmain]

The "bootnet.img" or "pcmcia.img" floppy that you create from the RedHat CD contains the network drivers. One disk contains all you need to start a network installation (assuming you have a compatible PCMCIA card). You can then install via an FTP, HTTP, or NFS server (preferably on your local network).

[Calum]

hey that's pretty flash right enough! i wonder if mandrake has anything like that (i will check it out) and i wonder if the stuff on the pcmcia disk can be slapped onto the hard drive to be used as normal with, for instance, basiclinux.
good ideas...

meanwhile, i was trying to download the ide kernel from here but it looks as if it needs me to compile it. i can't do that on one machine and then copy it onto the ohter can i? is it okay to compile a kernel on linux 2.4 and then just stick it into /boot on the basiclinux machine? as i said, basiclinux just wants me to 'copy the kernel into /boot' which doesn't seem to work for me.

kernels still confuse me. here's the spec for the basiclinux kernel, and this appears to be the same config file that comes with that ide kernel i just mentioned. does this mean (yes, i am slow!) that this file is the 'shopping list' that tells make what to include in the kernel? if this is the case (and if i knew anything about kernels) then shouln't i be able to download the source of that kernel and recompile using make after editing this config file?

of course there's a lot of other weird steps that i must somehow miss out as i haven't managed to config a kernel properly yet. if only it were as simple as cding into the directory and typing 'make'.

So. what's best re: kernel then? i suppose i will just have to download likely binary kernels if i can, unless i can get this one to work somehow.
Once i get lilo sorted i will start kernelling.

[Calum]

so how much should a second hand CD drive cost then? and which of those ports should it connect to? the parallel one?

also, what the hell is that docking port for?

[Calum]

hello again. well i made an image of the trinux pcmcia.img bootdisk, and it seems to have the driver for my pcmcia card on it. (edit - haven't tried it but that's what it looks like, i am almost certain of it) its kernel is a BzImage though, and i notice that basiclinux has a Zimage kernel. I presume that there's no easy hack where i can just copy some files somewhere and expect it to all work...

so how do i get this module to work in basiclinux? as i say, i don't have the source for the kernel, but i could get it off the slackware site i am sure, and recompile (except that i tend to fail at recompiling) and i'd have to do it using the mandrake machine. the driver itself appears to be a file called xircsomenumbers.tgz containing a file called xircsomenumbers.o which seems very simple to me. Just not sure if it's at all compatible. if i recall, trinux uses a 1.3 kernel, rather than the 2.0 kernel that basiclinux uses.

oh well, am i on the right track? or any track? am i whistling in the dark? should i just give up and get a 'real' distro? what the hell do i think i'm doing anyway? for the answers to these and other questions, tune in next week, same bat time, same bat channel for more from calum's thrilling (but ambling) monologue about how little he knows about linux when it all comes down to it!

[edit] re: getting the kernel source, what? i can't make sense of this! why don't they at least have a readme in there!? oh woe et c...

[edit]hey! looks like this 5MB thing is the kernel! how come the binary is 454kB then? i am confused... i certainly can't put 5MB on a floppy...

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[voidmain]

[ignore this message]

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[KernelPanic]

Calum I treid basiclinux today and i get the gay hpfs error. Version 1.7 seems to me to be seriously fucked. Unforunately I lost the old version I has in a catastrophic data loss thingy that happened a while ago. It is probably on some outdated FTP server somewhere. I might try to find it one day.

[Calum]

no, that error comes from the version of DOS i was using. use a MSDOS 5.0 bootdisk instead and you'll get on fine. i installed it on its own partition by running it in RAM by running boot.bat in DOS, then running bas2hd to install it on /dev/hda2. Still trying to track down how to include xircom creditcard support though, i'll get there...

[Calum]

i'm in over my head.

i can't make the xircom pcmcia card work in basiclinux or in windows 3.11 for workgroups, and i even have the xircom driver for windows 3.11 so how sad is that?

also, the computer has started to reboot randomly, every half hour or hour or so. i haven't seen it do this in windows, and i am reluctant to reinstall linux as i think it sets a bad precedent if it will need reinstalled this frequently.

i will probably end up buying a parallel port cdrom if i can ever find one, and a serial modem, which annoys me, but there you go.

I might then try JAILBAIT or some other linux. i might even try mandrake, but that really annoys me as i feel like i will be robbed of much of the customisability that i want to learn about. 'big name' distros just give me the impression of keeping things simple at the expense of keeping them cryptic.

well, i'm off to ebay. i've admitted defeat.

[Calum]

i keep finding single and double floppy distros which have no intention of being installed on the hard drive! does anybody know if there is a way to cannibalise this linux distro so i can have XFree on basiclinux, while only using floppies to get it there?

just a thought. thanks et c...

[edit] well it looks as if i need this. i can't understand much of these instructions though. i'll get there. sorry i keep posting and answering my own questions. maybe i'm not asking the right ones of myself though, as i seem to not be getting much further than just downloading lumps of stuff off the internet and not doing much with them.

[ November 30, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[KernelPanic]

Right this is what I think you should do. Since your network card only works in windows.

1) Partition you drive so that you have one 20Mb partition and another that occupies the rest.
2) Install Windows (yuk) on the larger partition and get it online.
3) Download xf86 with windows but onto the 20Mb partition.
4) Boot off of the basic linux floppies, format the windows (large) partition as ext2.
5) Do the hdinstall of basiclinux onto the freshly formatted partition.
6) Boot into you new basiclinux install.
7) Mount the 20Mb drive and recover the files from it.
8) install XFree86.

That is an anoying but clean enough solution for the XFree problem, but if you will need to install any large packages again you are stuffed.

Maybe scp works over a serial/parallel connection. Void Main?

[Calum]

a good enough solution however not quite specific to my needs, sorry to sound ungrateful,

actually the network card currently does not work with any of the systems on the laptop. as i say i have the xircom drivers but am missing something needed to connect to a network. it's probably the fact that i don't have tcp/ip set up in wfwg, so i downloaded it (it's 700k so no problem) and will try that. failing this, i think i'll be getting a serial modem as they seem quite cheap on ebay. can't find a decently priced cdrom drive though, i might have to get my zip100 drive back from storage...

if i get the xircom card operating in windows, then i can download there and flip the stuff over using linux, however i'd rather connect using linux to save me waiting for the download and not be able to use linux in the meantime. in a way it would be better to just get a serial modem and that way both systems would be on an even footing in a way...........

i heard that xircom used to have linux drivers for download, but not anymore!

anyway, thank you tux for going to the trouble of all this... i'll be using this thread as a way of continually updating my adventures on this laptop... looks like i have a lot to get through though.

edit - also i tried to use lilo for slackware 3.5, and also the lilo from the basiclinux page, and neither will do anything other than load linux. admirable yes, but if i try to add windows in the config file and then update the mbr, it will either just load linux all the same, or hang saying 'unexpected eof'.

so i am still booting into DOS and using loadlin. luckily i edited the autoexec.bat so that the first DOS prompt looks like a bootloader, giving you the option of 'win' or 'linux'. i'd prefer lilo to work though.

[ November 30, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[KernelPanic]

Grab GRUB from a more recent version of slackware.

[Calum]

i just got X to work!!!!!!!!!!!

thanks to void main telling me about the 'split' command, i can now get files larger than 1.4MB onto the new (old) laptop! great! xwindows is now on there, i am about to install gcc and next i'll be putting icewm on too...


 

[voidmain]

You could also have used "tar" to span multiple floppies. See the "-M" parameter:

http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_node/tar_137.html

[KernelPanic]

Hmm Calum, my old DOS disks are on 5-1/4 inch floppies lol. Will the version of DOS on the Windows 95 CD work? Or would freedos or DR-DOS work?