[Rule] Notes about slinky-0.5c and Fedora Core 5

[Arrigo Marchiori]

Hello everybody,

this is my first message here. I would like to briefly introduce myself and
then write here some notes I've collected during my first experience with
RULE. So, please know this will be a long e-mail. :-)

I'm and Italian Engineering student; I'm a member of LUGRoma, where I've
(mostly) electronically met Marco Fioretti, and I've learned about the RULE
project by the footer of his e-mails.

I decided to try RULE because I've got an old Pentium laptop, with 16 MB RAM,
and I wanted to see if I could make anything useful out of it. I tried DSL but
it took forever to start X. I tried Deli Linux but it didn't boot because of
Isolinux (only syslinux works on this ancient piece of hardware :-).

Here's what I think it might be useful to say here, perhaps repeating some of
the "Pending tasks" listed on the web site.

Please know that this was my very first time with Fedora; I know better SUSE
and Gentoo.


*** Web site ***

The first problem I encountered with RULE is the web site. I mean, it's there,
but it looks a bit outdated. And, the worst thing, I couldn't access the
installation guide: it (still) gives me an error in my native language, saying
that there's trouble with MySQL.

There also some broken links:
http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=37 referred by
http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=6

http://www.rule-project.org/test/ referred by
http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=15


*** Slinky and PCMCIA ***

I wanted to install RULE using the PMCIA network card I got with the
computer. I was using the ISO image slinky-0.5.05c.iso.  In the end, I
couldn't do it, I think because of the following reasons:

1- the ramdisk size is set to 16MB. My laptop had 16 MB, so it couldn't
boot. I managed to go past this problem.

2- the file PCMCIA/pcmcia.sh contains the line:
module_dir="/etc/modules/2.6.9/kernel/drivers/pcmcia"
that points to a non-existing directory (the kernel version is 2.6.15). I read
in the archives of this list that the problem was corrected, so I'm a bit
puzzled... :-\ Anyway, that was easy to fix by hand.

3- the modules included under the directory /PCMCIA/modules/ are for Linux
kernel version 2.4.something, not 2.6. You can see they end in ".o" instead of
".ko". So they were of no use to me.

4- the modules included in the boot floppy image were Ok, but there wan't the
program "pcmcia-socket-startup", that was needed for starting the PCMCIA
socket.

5- I think that, besides the old kernel modules, the slinky boot images
contain also the old interface to the kernel's PCMCIA drivers: "pcmcia-cs". If
you look at their web site: http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net, it says that
pcmcia-cs should be subsituted with "pcmciautils" (it's a Fedora's RPM), which
contains the executable I needed.

At this point, it was clear to me that I had to burn the first Fedora's CD and
use that. But I had another problem: the laptop has only one drive bay, that
can contain _either_ the CD-ROM _or_ the floppy!

So, here's what I've done; I hope you can find it interesting:


*** How to boot from a Linux floppy that isn't inserted in a computer running
    Windows ***

1- from a working GNU/Linux system install GRUB on a floppy, formatted with
   FAT filesystem

2- boot the target computer with its O.S.

3- copy the content of the floppy to the hard disk

4- copy the content of slinky's floppy and ISO image to the hard disk

5- boot the target computer with the floppy and install GRUB onto the
   hard-disk (it's got the files, so it needs only to set the MBR)

6- turn off the computer, take off the floppy drive and put in the CD-ROM
   drive with Fedora's CD in

7- start the computer and use GRUB to boot slinky's kernel with slinky's
   initrd

8- you're done: 
    - you've got slinky running
    - all the installation system is on the hard-drive, if you need any extra
      modules
    - you can wipe the HD when you're ready, because slinky is staying in the
      RAM


Right now, the laptop is running "yum update" and looks deadly slow. :-P
I needed to add some swap because it didn't have enough memory. Now it seems
it's working with 128 MB swap.

-- 
rigo

http://rigo.altervista.org