Little Spikey Land - linux

Well the hard drive on my linux box was getting a bit full recently (97% used!). Considering it's only 4Gig in size that's hardly surprising. So I cannabilised Mavis (my very old PC that has two hard drives) and got another 4 Gig drive which I have now set up as the /home partition. It was fairly easy, although I did run into one problem, in that the drive had previously been setup with a partition labelled "/" and /etc/fstab was setup to mount a partition labelled as "/" as the filesystem root. So upon first boot it didn't get very far and it got a bit confused.

To remedy this I changed /etc/fstab so that instead of referring to "LABEL=/" I specified the exact device (/dev/sda2). Then I was able to mount the 2nd hard drive elsewhere and copy the contents of /home to it, using cp -a to preserve everything properly. I then mounted the drive at /home and checked a few programs worked as normal (e.g. mozilla). At this point I had not deleted the original contents of /home, they were just hidden by the other drives contents. Then I deleted those files on the original drive (first unmounting the 2nd hard drive) to actually free up the space. Oh and all of that was done in single user mode (init 1) to make sure that nothing else was running at the time.

Anyway, now I have about 500M left spare on the main drive. Because it's not holding the /home directory it should hopefully not fill up too quick now. I also have nearly 4 Gig available on the other drive, which will be very handy soon, as I'll need it for storing stuff for my upcoming mini-project.

Edited on: Sunday, October 19, 2003 12:19 AM
posted at 12:18 AM John

Well seeing as I'm now at Uni again I thought I should get a printer. So I just got myself a funky new laser printer. What impressed me most about the one I got was that it actually said it was Linux compatible on the box. It's a Samsung ML-1510. Even more impressively I inserted the driver CD into my linux box, clicked yes to auto run, entered the admin password and then it installed, just like that! I did have to do a little bit of fiddling, but it still seemed far too easy for Linux (had to go into the config tool and add the printer again). Now I've just got to figure out where to put it ;^)

posted at 6:57 PM John

A small progress report on how the 4M Thinkpad 750 Linux experiment is going...

Installed PCMCIA fine, just had to copy if.h from /usr/linux to /usr/net to make it compile and then it worked fine. It detects my Psion Gold Card fine and with a few deft commands I have a net connection working. I'll need to make that happen automatically later, but that should not be too hard.

However I have been having trouble trying to install Lynx which is not a problem with Lynx, but the lack of memory makes running apt-get/dpkg a problem under debian. I think I'll need to just copy the binaries across from another system and install them manually.

Edited on: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 10:15 PM
posted at 6:19 PM John

I looked at the PsiLinux page again recently and toyed with the idea of installing Linux on my netBook. Unfortunately at the moment it's not too easy and I'd need to do a lot of fiddling to get it work right (and even then I would not have access to CF cards or PCMCIA cards). Plus I'd lose all my data (although obviously I can back that up).

Anyway whilst looking around the site I did come across a couple of interesting things:

• EpocEMX
• GNUpoc

The first is a port/series of ports of GNU software to EPOC ER5. This even includes a bash-like shell and gcc!

I've just installed the bare minimum for now, but it definitely beats eshell. I think my next job will be to try and get it setup to compile java easily. Currently it's a bit of a fiddle.

The second are a set of dev tools for writing Epoc/Symbian programs under Linux. Which is very cool as otherwise you need Windows to do the job.

Edited on: Monday, August 25, 2003 5:11 PM
posted at 2:43 PM John

Lately I have been trying to get Linux running on an IBM Thinkpad, which was donated by my Uncle. It's quite an old laptop and so only has 4M of RAM and a 33Mhz 486 processor. It was running Windows 3.1 when I got it. Needless to say that disappeared quite quickly.

I have been keeping notes about what I have done, and shall probably write them up in the near future, but to summarise here is what I have done so far:

• Used Small Linux to boot from two floppy disks, then setup the harddrive (created swap partitions etc).
• Copied the root disk of Small Linux to one (small) hard drive partition, thus freeing up the floppy drive.
• Copied the root file system of Debian Potato to another partition (using the "compact" kernel).
• Booted up from the Debian Potato installation disks, specifying the root disk as the hard drive partition from earlier. I also had to change to another virtual terminal (ALT-CTRL-F2) to enable the swap partition.
• Followed the Debian Potato installation. Then before reboot I altered /etc/inittab as it was attempting to run some other programs that swapped like crazy at boot up.
• With only 100K of free physical memory and nearly 2M taken up by the kernel I decided to compile a smaller kernel. I grabbed the latest sources for a 2.2 kernel and proceeded to attempt to compile a new kernel.
• A couple of weeks later I managed this (after copying some headers to the right places and installing an older compiler). This booted up, with only about 1M used by the kernel, leaving most of 3M for actually doing stuff in! Unfortunately I will need to recompile the pcmcia stuff, so I can use network cards and so forth, but hey at least I've compiled my first working kernel!

Once I get this laptop setup right it will probably end up as either a quiet firewall/server or a crude terminal thingy, mainly used to telnet in to any computers that I don't have monitors for.

Edited on: Saturday, August 16, 2003 12:26 PM
posted at 2:41 PM John