Re: [aclug-L] 386 kernel help

[Jeff <schaller@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Jonathan Hall wrote:

> With only 4mb RAM, you will more than likely NEED a HD (or some media for
> a swap partition).

Hmmm, you think so?
I let the 486 run for half a day or so (before mercilessly powering it
straight off -- I love running of off ramdisk) :) and it had no problems.
*cough*
Of course, there wasn't much on it -- it's hard to put much on a 1.44 disk
that's got a 300k kernel on it :)
But I'm thinking -- hoping -- that I'll be fine w/o a hard drive.  If push
comes to shove, I'll recompile the kernel and let it use the HD for swap.


> I booted a diskless 386 before with 8mb RAM... that was barely enough.  
> To even load a shell, your computer will need to be able to swap to
> disk. I don't know if that's what's causing this problem, but it could
> be...

barely enough? was `free` showing tight usage? swap out to load a shell!?
ack :) I'm using 'ash' instead of 'bash', which is smaller and uses a lot
fewer libraries. I'm _thinking_ it's not the shell, yet (it worked on the
486 version), since it's not even getting to init yet.


> Also, I know many of the Distribution's installation floppies require 6mb
> to run (while only requiring 4mb to run Linux once it's installed).

Oooh, goofy. I'll keep that in mind if the redhat disk doesn't work.


> Are you using a custom-made boot disk, or a pre-packaged "Rescue disk"?

Right now, a custom-made one.
The basic procedure is:
dd if=kernel of=/dev/fd0
rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/fd0
rdev -R /dev/fd0 0
rdev -r /dev/fd0 2^^14+kernel_blocks
dd if=fs.gz of=FD seek=kernel_blocks

-jeff
-- 
Ralph: Oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm a Viking!
Ralph: Me fail English?  That's unpossible!