The problem with floppy distros is that they all load a ramdisk. It's hard
enough getting a modern kernel into 4mb, much less a ~3mb rootfs. The
solution is to put a kernel onto a floppy and to try to get an *uncompressed*
rootfs onto another, and rdev the kernel to prompt for the second floppy. See
the bootdisk howto for the particulars.
Here's a hint for fitting all that onto a floppy: use libc2 (REAL old) and
use only those programs that are absolutely necessary to boot. This requires
that you have more than one libc installed and linkable, and that you have
essentially this on the disk: fdisk, dd, mke2fs, lilo, e3, rdev, mkswap,
mount, a live chicken, a shell (usually ash linked to the libc2), and to know
the exact block size of the kernel so you can get just that off the first
floppy. Once you're booted and can set up the hdd to boot as well, you can
start mounting floppies and copying files over. Start with the networking and
some kind of client program that can dl the files that don't fit on a floppy.
The hardest part is setting up the devel environment to produce these real
tiny libc2-linked programs and avoiding the temptation to mount another
floppy when the second one is still mounted as root!
dd is for copying the files over (and for pulling the working kernel from the
first floppy) and e3 is a *very* small (~5k) text editor written in assembly
that does not require any external libraries. If you have mkswap you
generally don't need the chicken, but if you don't have it then the chicken
is absolutely required.
All this will take several hours to set up. Get out the caffeine. This is not
a good time to quit smoking.
Glen
On Friday 16 November 2001 19:39, you wrote:
> use tom's root-boot and build a LFS.
>
> www.linuxfromscratch.org
>
> I don't know how long it will take to build a LFS on a 386, but you don't
> need all the stuff that LFS uses (gettext, etc)
>
> go to irc.linuxfromscratch.org to get help with making the installation
> tiny.
>
> Scot Mc Pherson
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