From: hlu@yoda.wsu.edu (H.J. Lu)
Subject: ANNOUNCE: 0.98 pl1 rootdisk on tsx-11.
Originator: hlu@yoda.eecs.wsu.edu
Organization: Washington State University!
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 92 06:26:32 GMT

I forgot to mention that the kernel on my bootable root disk is
0.98 pl 1 and compress is updated to 4.2.4.

H.J.
---
These are bootable root disks for Linux. Kernel is 0.98 patch level 1.
There are some basic binaries on root disks, all of which are linked
with jump table 4.1. They are on tsx-11.mit.edu under
pub/linux/GCC/rootdisk.

This is a partial list of what are on root disks.

1. bash 1.12
2. gnu tar 1.10 (tar.Z) (it is not in 5.25" version.)
3. compress 4.2.4
4. elvis 1.6
5. doshell, chmod, chown, cp, ls, mv, rm, and ln.
6. mount, umount, swapon (it may not be in 5.25" version.)
7. more (it may not be in 5.25" version.)
8. ps, free, tload, w, top and uptime
9. mkfs, fsck, fdisk and mkswap ((it may not be in 5.25" version.)

There are two versions of root disks, one, 3rootdisk.Z, for 3.5" drive,
the other, 5rootdisk.Z, for 5.25" drive. Please do

1. uncompress [3|5]rootdisk.Z.
2. rawrite or dd it to a floppy disk.
3. boot that floppy disk.

For 5.25" version rootdisk, there are only a few free blocks left. You
may have trouble to use vi. But you can delete the files you don't need
from the root disk. Also there is no `swapon' on 5.25" version
rootdisk. There will be some message about `swapon' not found when you
boot the 5.25" version rootdisk. That is harmless since there is no
swap space on the 5.25" version rootdisk. You can get `swapon' from
Linux Base System mentioned below.

If you want to use it to install Linux on your HD, you are on your own.
Everything is there. But you have to know how to use them.

Suppose you want to install Linux on partition, /dev/hdxx, whose size
is yyyy K bytes, you can use fdisk to find it out, you do

mkfs /dev/hdxx yyyyy
mount /dev/hdxx /mnt
(cd /; cp -av . /mnt)

If you have installed Linux on your hard drive, you may not want to
overwrite some files on your Linux partition. Please only copy
what you need.

There are two shared math images on root disks. The hard version,
libmh.so.4.0, is for 387 only. The soft version, libms.so.4.0, uses
those 387 instructions emulated inside the kernel. The default shared
math image, libm.so.4.0, is linked with the soft version. You should
relink it to the hard version if you have a 387 by doing

cd /mnt/lib
rm libm.so.4.0
ln -s libmh.so.4.0 libm.so.4.0

Please note. The shared image on root disk may not be the latest due
to the small capacity of the floppy. You may get the latest shared
images from the Linux C library disks under pub/linux/GCC/libdisk.

You now should edit /mnt/etc/fstab to make sure /dev/hdxx will be
mounted as root. There are some examples in /mnt/etc/fstab. After that,
do

cd /mnt/etc/lilo
rm map boot.????
./lilo -r /mnt -b /dev/hdxx -i boot.b -v -v -v /vmlinux

Now, you can boot Linux from your HD. To install the other stuffs
should be very trivial now since you have tar and compress on your HD,
and you can boot Linux off your HD.

I suggest you get the Linux Base System on tsx-11.mit.edu under
pub/linux/GCC/basedisk. It is packed with system utilities. Please
read README.basedisk in the directory mentioned above for details.

The other packages are ispell 3.09 under pub/linux/GCC/basedisk,
gcc 2.2.2d7 under pub/linux/GCC/gccdisk and the Linux C library
under pub/linux/GCC/libdisk.

I will try to update my root disk regularly with Linus' new kernel.

This root disk works on my machine with 100MB IDE drive. I don't know
anything about your machine or SCSI. Wish you good luck.

Correct me if I am wrong. Tell me about your story.


Thanks.

H.J.
hlu@eecs.wsu.edu
10/04/09