Tuesday, Debtember 14, 1999
@%$@#@$^@$@#$@#!%
Mark pointed me to Thix, yet another free Unix clone for 80x86 based machines. This one was written back in '94 or so and it looks like it's self-hosting, which is good. It doesn't support networking, which is bad (but not that bad). It looks like it'll run fine on a small system, which is good. But the installation disk doesn't contain a program to make the filesystem, which is bad (and that's bad).
This makes the current installations of Linux trivially easy by comparrison.
The setup assumes you have Linux already installed on another partition and
can run the mktfs program from Linux. Ha ha. That's a good
one.
I took a look at the source code to mktfs (good thing this is an
Open Source ™ project) to see how the filesystem is laid out and
thinking I could write a quick assembly hack to create the filesystem, dump
the program to a floppy so that it executes when booted and go from
there.
I then got the idea to hack mktfs itself to read/write to an image
file. My thought—instead of having it write to a device, just have it act
on a file, then dump that image to the harddrive.
Hack hack hack debug debug debug ah good. Compress the image, dump to floppy, move over to the lap top, extract from floppy and decompress onto the appropriate partition, reboot and …
No go.
Next up … hack up the TFS version of fsck, run that on the image
file, and try again.
Well … something's wrotten in the state of Denmark. It seems the author keeps mixing up if he has his units in blocks or bytes.
Or it could be that it's so crocked up it can't be fixed …
Wednesday, Debtember 15, 1999
D'oh!
I finally got the
Thix
filesystem utilities mktfs and tfsck working, although
what I changed to make it work I'm not entirely sure since I wasn't keeping
that close a track of what I was doing. It seemed to go okay after I went
through the mktfs code line by line, seeing the values being
calculated and stored in the superblock of its filesystem.
I had created two partitions on the drive in the laptop—an 8M partition for swap (if Thix supports it, I'm still not sure) and the rest (~108M) for the actual filesystem.
Finally I got an 108M (108.0117188 * 1024 * 1024 gives 113,258,496 bytes, so
you see I'm using the computer definition of megabyte, not the disks
manufacturer's definition) image file created, and a few runs through
tfsck fixed it up. Ran gzip over the image, which
compressed it down to something like an 11K file. I transfered it to floppy
(tar cf /dev/fd0 thxfs.img.gz), sneakered it over to the
laptop.
I created a Minix filesystem on the 8M partition (using
Tom's Root Disk),
extracted the file from the floppy (tar xf /def/fd0) and then
extracted the image file to the appropriate partition(gzip -dc
thxfs.img.gz | dd of=/dev/hda2).
Several long minutes later, it was done. Booted from the Thix installation disk, it mounted the partition no problem, installed a bunch of stuff, popped the floppy out and rebooted.
Ah, the master boot record must be bad. Okay, this is easy. Let me approach this all wrong and spend an hour or so writing a custom boot sector on a floppy that will then read the partition table from a harddrive and boot from that.
It would have worked too, if it weren't for those pesky kids.
Sorry. I would have worked too, if in fact, a boot sector and kernel were actually part of the partition!
Oops. I should have read the installation instructions better. Especially the part:
Go into the Thix source tree (../thix). Edit the file fs/mount.c and set the root_device to point to the partition you want to install Thix on. That is, uncomment this lines: /* /dev/hda3 */ int root_device = HDC_MAJOR * 0x100 + 4;
and well, it goes on from there. Had I a bit more time, I probably could do it. Heck, had I a bit more time, I probably could have gotten Linux on the thing.
Mark suggested FreeBSD or Slackware. Can't use FreeBSD since I think that requires a math-coprocessor (although I'm sure Mark will correct me if that is not the case) and I unfortunately ran out of time to try Slackware (which probably would work).
I'm out of time, because I'm leaving for Palm Springs in, oh, less than 12 hours now.
![[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2023/1023.t.jpg "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades")