Hi Ken, On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 03:38:42PM -0600, Ken Fuchs wrote: <snip> > >One of my pet peaves is the live-cds, boot disks, that all require > >GOBS of ram(for big initrd's), making them useless on older machines. > >When knoppixs boots on a 128MB machine and says I don't have enough ram > >that makes me mad(I know, I can boot without the gui). > > I'm confused. Are you trying to build a small initrd for normal booting > or a small initrd to install a distribution on a machine with low memory? Well, yes, both. I do some embedded stuff, and testing/work on older machines. So my concept of installing and running linux on these class of machines is to boot(any way you can) run fdisk, setup a filesystem, then copy a small fs(from CDROM or network) over, chroot, edit fstab, run lilo,.. I have used custom kernels, and compiled in common ethernet drivers, I really like the kernel nfsroot trick to boot off a NFS root with just the kernel. I like to have UMSDOS compiled in, in case I want to borgify an old WIN/DOS machine without repartitioning. Problem is, the more you add like this as a monolithic kernel, the bigger it gets, and you always need some new driver for the next machine. My goal is to switch to using a stock distro kernel and initrd to do some of these things, that way I don't have to compile the bloody kernel every time I want to penguinify some machine. I would just add the module I need to the initrd, tweak the syslinux or initrd thing to do my bidding.. > A huge installation initrd on a CD-ROM could be loop mounted read only > right on the CD rather than loaded into memory and the memory image loop > mounted. This way the installation should work (slowly) on even very > low (8-16MB) memory machines. I just boot to root on CDROM now, root=/dev/hdx, works great. I think initrd pretty much by definition goes to RAM. But I think I know what you mean, the cloop thing, maybe, eh? All for now, cheers, Karl. > Sincerely, > > Ken Fuchs <kfuchs at winternet.com> > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list