What modifications to DOS's LOADLIN Linux loader would I need to run Puppy Linux "Wary" as a Frugal Install in a logical partition on this low-end PC??
Some details on this.
- No, I cannot upgrade the available RAM with higher capacity hard-to-find 72-pin SIMMs that this desktop PC takes.
(- Needless to say, Windows 9x is NOT getting re-installed on this PC!)
- No also; I'm just not going to install Grub, Grub 2, or Grub4DOS on the hard drive (MBR) or on a floppy/cd to boot-up Wary....sorry.
- DOS is installed on the first 500MB partition of the hd (/dev/hda1) and I used DOS FDISK to partition the rest of the hd (~1.7GB) as an Extended partition (/dev/hda2)
- I was able to boot and use a DamnSmallLinux liveCD to create a swap partition of 128MB and an ext2 partition of about 1.6GB (/dev/hda5 and /dev/hda6 respectively), then used the same DSL liveCD to format the 1.6GB partition as ext3 for the Frugal Install of Wary
- The Wary liveCD build that seems to works best on booting this old PC is the alternative build with 2.6.31.14 uniprocessor "ide" kernel (see http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewCat=Wary&p=5 and http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02099 )
The 'hard-Puppy' installation guide at http://www.puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm suggests the following for doing a manual frugal install of PuppyLinux:
Seems to me, then, that the 1st step is to boot the Wary alternative buildCD and then copy the three key files to the ext3 partition that I'd frugally install Wary onto.Some people like to do a frugal install of Puppy manually, and this is quite simple also. You choose what partition, then copy the files 'vmlinuz', 'initrd.gz' and 'pup_xxx.sfs' (and maybe 'z*.sfs') from the CD to the partition. Normally you would place the files at '/' in the hard drive partition, but Puppy has support for installing into a subdirectory.
As far as setting up DOS LOADLIN to boot Wary rather than setting up GrubX to do the same from the Puppy Wary Universal Installer, I found these links:
- The Loadlin+Win95/98/ME mini-HOWTO http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Loadlin+Win95-98-ME.html (it's almost essentially for DOS rather than Win9x!)
- The loadlin DOS-executables and tarballs download site http://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/
- The 'Setting up Loadlin' section of http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Install-Strategies/x349.html
From these series of links as well as the hard-Puppy one, I'm thinking that THIS might very well work:
- - Mount both the DOS partition and the ext3 partition.
- Copy the Wary vmlinuz and initrd.gz files from the ext3 partition to the DOS C:\<subdirectory> where LOADLIN.EXE resides
- Reboot into native DOS and then run Wary by the commandstringCode: Select all
C:\<subdirectory>\loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 initrd=initrd.gz
Thanks for feedback or even for further references on this