Damn Small Linux - Not!

HapHazard · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 6

I have read all the postings and have not come across a situation quite like mine (although many are close). I have a laptop with no hard drive, dead CDRom, but functioning USB and floppy. I have managed to get DSL-N to boot by building a DOS boot floppy with DOS USB drivers which mount my thumb drive as a hard drive. I have extracted the contents of the DSL-N iso onto my FAT32 thumb drive and then added linld to the isolinux directory. After the floppy boots to DOS I can run linld from the isolinux directory and get it to boot DSL-N. All is well and good.... But the thumbdrive is mounted during the boot process as /cdrom. From that mount point I can see the KNOPPIX and isolinux directories as well as all the other files on the thumb drive. The problem I am having is since this is mounted as /cdrom (basically DSL-N thinks it boot from a CD) the mount is read only. I would like to be able to use the thumb drive to store the backup.tar.gz file to but since it is read only I can't do this. The other strange thing is the sda1 device shows as mounted but there are no files shown on the sda1 mount (sda1 is what the thumb drive normally shows up as). Does anyone on here have advice for how I can configure some part of the boot process to allow writing to the thumb drive for backups? I notice in the DSL forum someone suggested starting dsl with the cheatcode of "dsl write" but I can't even find where I specify cheat codes for DSL-N (I do not get a normal "boot:" prompt when I boot (maybe linld swallows it).
Thanks

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

Does you linld have an append section.
The boot option that you want is frugal
This will remount to read-write

HapHazard · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 6

Thanks for the frugal cheat code. Here is what my linld command line looks like:

linld image=c:\isolinux\linux initrd=c:\isolinux\minirt.gz "cl=ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt.gz frugal nomce BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix"

The "cl=..." parameter for linld is where I think I'm supposed to specify cheatcodes, etc. This seems to be working for other parameters like lang=us and vga=791 (I can verify both of these seem to be taking effect). Unfortunately the frugal paramter does not seem to be doing anything. I still see all of the contents of the USB thumb drive in the /cdrom mount and everything on the thumb drive is still read only. I notice there is one other thread in here which is very similar to mine. I think if someone can solve one of them then the other will be solved. Can anyone figure out why frugal is not working?

HapHazard · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 6

I'm making progress....
I ran the following command and now I can write to the thumb drive:

>sudo mount -w -o remount /cdrom

After this command I can also use the backup tool to backup my settings. The last thing I have to figure out is how to get the above command somewhere in the start up sequence. My fuzzy memory thinks it is somewhere in /etc/init but I don't know for sure. Does anyone know a good place to put the command in the boot sequence? I think this will solve a lot of folks problems because now the system thinks I am booting from CD so there is only write operations to the thumb drive whenever I initiate them (like backup or restore).

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

That mount/remount command is the very action that the [b]frugal[/b] boot does! That boot code amoung the many others unique to DSL/DSL-N are in /etc/init.d/dsl-config which is run at boot up from /etc/rcS.d/S01dsl-config. I run several systems from usb devices without an issue. I am very curious on the boot sequence that you must be using to ignore these boot options. It would appear that many other boot options would also then fail with this setup.

BTW, which DOS USB device support are you using? The Panasonic, DUSE, or... ? Is this solution you are attempting going to be FOSS or closed proprietary?

I assume your interest in this, is that it would supply a single DOS boot floppy instead of needing two boot floppies that are currently available?

For your particular purpose, you might try the mount/remount command in /opt/bootlocal.sh. That file is run as root much later in the system bootup sequence but before starrting X.

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

OK. I looked into this...
My goal was to be able use a standard DSL-N USBHDD type frugal installed pendrive and on those machines which cannot boot via the USBHDD BIOS option, I wanted a [b]single boot floppy[/b] which would work.

So, I created a bootable DOS floppy and added:
1. ASPI Manager for USB mass storage Version 2.20
2. Di1000 ASPI DISK DRIVER Ver 2.00
3. LINLD Ver 0.97

Now, having my standard DSL-N USBHDD type frugal pendrive plugged into a machine that CANNOT boot USBHDD and then boot from the DOS floppy. DOS scans for USB devices and finds and registers my pendrive as drive C:

My real hard drive C: is not touched or used in anyway.

My autoexec.bat contains only the following:

linld image=c:\linux initrd=c:\minitr.gz "cl=ramdisk_size=100000 lang=us frugal noprompt noeject"

Thats it!
It booted DSL-N from my pendrive.
All boot options, including frugal were recognized and I was able to perform a backup to sda1

Boot up and shutdown performed as would be expected.

HapHazard · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 6

Wow. Lots of extra info and ome new things to try. To answer your questions... I am using this approach because the floppy drive in the machine I am using does not like the larger size disk that the two disk boot system provides. I am not sure why but the frugal option just does not work. Part of the problem might be because I am using a thumb drive with other files on it (it actually also boots a BartPE system on machines which can boot from USB). I have essentially the same floppy setup you detailed above.... boot to DOS, load two drivers for USB which mounts the USB to C: then run linld with the line I specified above. I currently have a KNOPPIX and isolinux directory on the USB drive which I copied from the live CD. I have not performed a frugal install because I was under the impression it would destroy the data I already have on the USB. The current state of my system is I tried adding the mount command to the bootlocal.sh and it appeared to save but for some reason when the system would normally want to find the backup on sda1 it is not mounted. After a reboot the changes are gone. I have a few more thoughts after the info you provided so I'll try those things and post back the results.
Thanks

HapHazard · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 6

OK, I changed my linld line to:

linld image=c:\isolinux\linux initrd=c:\isolinux\minirt.gz "cl=ramdisk_size=100000 lang=us frugal noprompt noeject vga=791"

and now everything works! Apparently one of the other commandline options was conflicting with the frugal setting. So now we have another method to boot to DSL-N running on a USB drive when the bios does not support USB booting. This method also allows having other stuff on the USB drive (like my BartPE boot environment). The last thing I've done is image the floppy I use for booting and saved the image along with a copy of rawwrite.exe on the USB drive so I can create a boot floppy if needed.
Thanks for the help and maybe someone else will figure out why the commandline options I had would not allow the frugal option to work.

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

Thanks for sharing this.
I am enjoying this new boot option too.

HapHazard · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 6

Last hurdle (I hope).... Now I want to create a directory on the same USB drive to hold my user data files in. I can cd to /mnt/sda1 and then "sudo mkdir mydata" but when I try to write to the mydata directory I do not have permissions. I have tried "sudo chmod..." and various mount options but the only way I can do any writing to sda1 or its subdirectories is as root. I know the "frugal" mount option is only intended to support reading and writing the system backup but hopefully someone knows a way to make a single directory on sda1 writable by user instead of root.
Thanks

midzeh · Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1

I have a dell inspiron 8200 laptop which has a broken drive controller, so all it has is 512mb ram, usb ports and a floppy drive.

With regular DSL I was able to ressurect this beast with just the usb boot floppy and sticking the knoppix image file on a usb-hdd.

I used the to-ram boot option then was able to remount the usb-hdd (sda1 - fat16) and have been able to backup and also place mydsl extension apps there.

To give dsl-n a test run, I just copied the knoppix image over the regular dsl knoppix image on my usb-hhd and it worked fine, not sure if this is a bad idea but it worked for me so I offer an alternative.

*EDIT: I now notice that I used the boot floppy from normal dsl with the 2.4 kernel on this dsl-n which has a 2.6 kernel, If the developers have not considered making a usb boot floppy image for dsl-n please do!