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SuperSlak - Linux On A SuperDisk
_EternaL_ writes: "What could be more fun then hitting the eject button on your floppy drive, and swapping out your root file system? You say you don't wanna partition your hard drive to play with Linux? That's no excuse, install to your superdisk! Now there's a solution for anyone interested in getting a feel for Linux that doesn't have the space or time to install Linux on a hard drive, but has a Superdisk drive! Folks out there might be interested in knowing that installation to an internal ls120 (ie: SuperDisk) is possible. It took a bit of work, but thanks to moomonk it's fairly easy. You might wanna check out the basic howto over at electricgod.net. If that's not working out for you, you can also try over at dokks.com!"
moomonk here (eternal & dokks can vouch for that). I didn't have this ready for release when I just noticed the story on /.. Damn ;-) Well anywhoo... This is really three things. At color.gz: A replacement for Slackware's color.gz root disk that will install directly to an ATA floppy drive (could be Zip if you felt like it). I didn't get around to putting the support for creating swap files on the root device so you'll have to do that yourself. Besides that it works peachy. Linux works much better on an ext2 filesystem then UMSDOS on a superdisk. I had X running with Mozilla off a disk from this earlier last week. It's slick for having a quickie system. par-pf.i: Almost like Slackware's paride.i boot disk except that it actually works. The Slackware boot disk includes the driver for paride CD/IDE/ATA floppy/ATA disk/ATA generic and the combination of them all breaks the disk. This only loads the ATA floppy driver but is otherwise identical. suprdisk.txt: Some notes on installing several distributions directly to a SuperDisk. In general, Debian and Slackware can be coerced (and with color.gz Slack even likes it). Mandrake and Red Hat were plain broken and aren't worth bothering with. SuSe also worked nice but was too large to be useful. In general, the idea to tricking the installer is to mount the superdisk at the installation mount point and then get the installer to ignore any linux partitions. You can get Slackware to install using the default color.gz if you have a linux partition and just mount the disk at /mnt. The installer doesn't need to touch the linux partition, it just needs to see one. For debian mount the disk at /target, skip the install section, ignore the error and then continue. The most important bit wasn't done at all. H. Peter Anvin's SYSLINUX works really slick if you have a UMSDOS file system like ZipSlack. Just unzip ZipSlack to the floppy, unzip 120linux.zip to the floppy and then run the syslinux program on the disk. The zip includes all the required configuration files. Under linux this is syslinux -s /dev/hd? where ? is a-d for a=primary, master b=primary, slave c=secondary, master d=secondary. If you'd like to have a ext2 file system you should use lilo. Go ahead and use a generic lilo configuration file. Just be sure to include this additional bit: disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd The idea is to trick the boot loader to access the floppy device on boot. The linux kernel will get it right later so you'll set your root to something like /dev/hdc or the ilk. My lilo.conf looks like # LILO start prompt default=3 # because i like my configuration to boot nicely message=/boot/message.txt # it describes the images 1-4 compact image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda label=1 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb label=2 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc label=3 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdd label=4 single-key read-only disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd bios=0x00 #LILO end eternal may have mirred these files to electricgod.net but their home is on dokks.com
Remember ZipSlack? It was quite similar, but used a 100 MB Zip disk. It also usd the UMSDOS filesystem, and thus could simply be placed into a Windows/DOS directory and used from there.
This is still cool, though, because I have an LS-120 and not a Zip drive.
J