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.
Avast ye swabs …
You see, I tried installing a (cough) commercial OS (cough) on the laptop
someone was kind enough to toss my way. It is one of my favorite operating
systems, it installed fine, and with plenty of space left over (even after
the GUI was installed) but it still lacked a development system which was
kind of the point in the first place. I mean, I had vi, but if all
I'm going to do is editing, I might as well take my DataGeneral one laptop
(80C88, 464K RAM, two 720K floppies, state of the art in 1984 when it came
out).
I'm leaving on a jet plane …
It's the Gay 90s here in Palm Springs. You're either gay, or 90.
—Donald Conner, my Dad.
I should mention that I'm flying off to visit Dad for the next two weeks. He lives in Palm Springs, California, a desert community were the parents of the retirees in Florida live.
The upshot of that is there will be no updates here for the next two weeks, followed by the sudden appearence of two week's worth of material, most likely non-computer or Internet related.
Maybe it's for the best I didn't have a laptop.
Closure
And one last note, via my dog wants to be on the radio, is the sad news that Charles Schulz is retiring from the Comics Industry after nearly 50 years of drawing “Peanuts.”
One of those quiet earth shaking moments when you realize that everything eventually passes on. But even though I haven't read a “Peanuts” strip in years, I knew it would always be there. It's been there all my life. And now that I think about it, for most of my parents' life as well.
