Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
Dual Booting with VERY minimal installs
Kintaro:
I have seen Windows 2, but not much, i know Windows XP has all sorts of games that have been in Linux for years (Reversi, and other crap).
mobrien_12:
I remember reversi from windows 1.
Calum:
rightyho.
the laptop has arrived. it has no CD drive, which isn't a surprise, but it does make me wonder how i'm going to get stuff on and off the hard drive! it has no internal modem, although it has two PCMCIA slots and i can use a Xircom credit card modem (which i happen to have kicking about) if i can get an operating system to recognise it, there is (of course) no USB or firewire port, so i cannot use my USB cdwriter as a CD drive, i don't think (unless there's some weird way of converting it) what the laptop does have is a serial port, a parralel port, something which might well be another differently shaped parallel port (haven't seen one like that before, with three rows of pins) and a 'docking' port, which has me totally baffled, as it is a big long port with four rows of pins (for want of a better word), all very small.
so, i used linux fdisk to create the following partition table:
1. 180MB - MSDOS 6.2 (soon to be windows 3.11 for workgroups once i get the dual boot happening)
2. 303MB - Linux (ext2)
3. 32MB - Linux swap (still appears to be ext2, not sure how that works yet)
Interesting problems ensue. the lilo that i downloaded from the basiclinux site appears to only want to boot to basiclinux, today i will be investigating if i can download GRUB onto a floppy (as floppies are the only way i have right now to get data onto the machine) and use it instead. seems the bios can only support 4 primary partitions but that's no problem since i only need the three i mention above.
One concern for me is that part of the install process of putting basiclinux on the hard drive is that you physically copy the kernel to /boot, but when i do this and try to boot from it, it hangs pretty early in the booting process (during the kernel stage, before any processes are initiated), so i don't know what's going on there. maybe i will have to find another floppy distro of linux to put on, but i really wanted basiclinux. i have read all the available basiclinux documentation about a half dozen times and this isn't covered. the documentation is quite terse about most things in fact, which is good in its way...
anyway, i might have to buy an external cdrom drive on eBay, but i am reluctant to buy an external modem and i am worried that i might have to recompile the kernel if i want to use the Xircom PCMCIA card, and last week when i recompiled on the mandrake machine i followed all the instructions in the other thread, and i still got a shitload of problems and had to reinstall, i think it's just me. also, of course, basiclinux does not come with source code, which i will need for kernel recompilation... i suppose i can download it from many sites elsewhere...
maybe not onto a floppy though...
anyway - thoughts anyone?
edit - also, anybody know of a tool that i can install either in basiclinux or DOS that will allow me to split files across more than one floppy? one of the XFree install files is too big for a floppy, and i think some of the stuff i need to install for a C compiler is as well.
preferably this tool will allow me to create multiple disks on a windows 2000 computer, and then stick them together again in basiclinux, but that's a long shot and if i need to i'll settle for one that i can create the disks in mandrake 9.0 and then put them back together again using basiclinux or DOS.
thanks of course in advance... ;)
[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
voidmain:
I have an old Dell Latitude (the boner burner) that has no CD-ROM drive. I have a PCMCIA Linksys 10/100 Ethernet adapter that I used to do a network install of RedHat 6.2. It worked very well. I tried to upgrade it to RedHat 8.0 but the network boot disk didn't like my older PCMCIA hardware so I couldn't. It's ok though because I think RedHat 6.2 runs great on this old machine and there probably wouldn't have been enough room on the drive to upgrade to 8.0 anyway. In fact now that I think about it I am sure there wouldn't have been enough room. It's only a 500MB drive. But RedHat 6.2 and KDE run great on it at 100Mhz with 72MB of RAM.
Calum:
well, i don't think i want to put any big distro on there, i am happy with something the size of basiclinux (three floppies worth) also, i have no idea how to do a network install! not only that, but i am sure the PC card network card would need software to be recognised by the computer, so how would i install through it before i had installed the software?!?!?
:D of course there's a lot that i don't know yet, but i'll find out!
[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
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