Re: [Sheflug] linux on an ageing laptop?

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

> hi all,
> 
> i've been challenged to utilize an old laptop as a remote access terminal for a building management system at work! trouble is.... it's got a (not surprizingly) broken installation of windows 3.11 on it. the 3.11 disks are not available, so i need a compact OS - enter LINUX !
> 

Well...if you've a PCMCIA slot, your one step better than me :) I've a 
486SX-25 laptop, with a 200MB hard drive, 12MB RAM and a floppy drive...I've 
ended up with a stripped down SuSE 6.2 distribution fitting in 12MB of disk 
space. Which is pretty good going :)

How I did it:
1. Using tomsrtbt (a single floppy dist that gives all the essentials to get 
a system running), fdisk and created the paritions, hacked fstab, passwd, 
shadow and other system files.
2. Trial and error, copied over files I needed, including: libc, login, init, 
inittab, all of /etc/rc.d, you'll probably then find, if you're copying it 
from your main machine, you may need all the PAM libs and config.
3. Built a kernel on my main machine, copied onto laptop; brought lilo over, 
and had to do some symlink hacking to be able to build ld.so.cache.

The difficult bit is getting it to boot in the first place without a rescue 
disk; you'll need a decent disk (I recommend tomsrtbt) for the first few 
boots. Once lilo is on, you've copied a kernel over, login, pam, the rc tree, 
init have been copied over and you've got a sensible ld.so.conf/ld.so.cache, 
the hard bits out the way. I also remember having to hack lilo as well (I 
copied the lilo over from tomsrtbt but it didn't like the boot.b file I'd 
copied from my main box ... different versions of lilo...this meant finding 
the source for the lilo on tomsrtbt, building, copying this boot.b over, then 
when I had a working machine, upgrade lilo to that of my main box).

You can raw-tar onto a floppy disk (for example; tar cvf /dev/fd0 
/boot/zImage) but you need good disks - tar is not forgiving if your disk has 
bad sectors - the write will look good, but when you come to untar, you'll 
get read errors. Also, with the tar on tomsrtbt you can't span floppy disks 
or use compression - it's a cut down tar.

But as I say, once booted and you can login (that's a *really* minimal 
setup), then you can copy over everything else. ldd is your friend when it 
comes to finding libraries you need.

It's a good learning exercise... :)

As it is, the laptop I use is a console into my sun, using minicom. I've 
copied ppp onto it as well, so I can ppp into the sun, giving me a TCP 
connection so I can ftp/telnet to my main box. :)

Chris...

-- 
@}-,'--------------------------------------------------  Chris Johnson --'-{ [at] 
    / "If not for me then, do it for yourself.  /   sixie [at] nccnet.co.uk    \
   / If not for me, then do it for the world"  /  www.nccnet.co.uk/~sixie  \ 
  /                          -- Stevie Nicks  /                             \


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