On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 08:03:01AM +0100, Russell Coker wrote: | On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 18:53, Harry Palmer wrote: | > I have a (decent, 400MHz PII) laptop with no CDROM and an LS120 IDE | > floppy drive instead of a standard floppy (which boot disks pick up as | > hdd). | > | > Is that me stuffed as far as getting potato up and running? I tried a | > few things with the idepci boot set, but there doesn't seem to be a | > way of getting beyond the first boot floppy and getting the root | > filesystem loaded. Has anybody been here before? | | Couldn't you reconfigure the boot disk to use root=/dev/hdd? From memory the | Potato boot disk uses loadlin so it should be easy to change the | specification for the root device.
I thought it used LILO. The first screen certainly looks like lilo as used by RH 6.1 and 7.0 to me. | One thing I have been considering is to create a NFS-root floppy for laptops. | This would involve an initrd kernel using busybox (or some other statically | linked program with lots of utilities) with cardmgr compiled in. Then the | /linuxrc could start pcmcia, put the network up, and have a network start | script that mounts NFS and does pivot_root and "exec /sbin/init". This can | only be done with woody, however the image on the NFS server could be any | version of Linux as long as it doesn't stop the PCMCIA... ;) | | To do this I need to squeeze the kernel modules necessary and all the cardmgr | stuff into 440K of gzip -9 compressed space. | | If you're interested in testing this then let me know. This sounds quite interesting. Would it be possible to test it (aside from the PCMCIA) with a desktop machine? I've got an old system with an ne2k nic that I would like to set up as a diskless terminal. So far I've gotten stuck in getting it to recognize my other machine as having an NFS server. This would be a good way to determine which side the problem is on (since, presumably, you know what you're doing and would have the client correct :-)) -D
