[BozemanLUG] Older PC hardware and older distros . .

[David Eder]

I have 10 hours of battery life.  It's a 12 volt battery that is connected
to a generator that is turned by the movement of the vehicle.  The
interface is kinda messy as it goes through a couple layers of legacy
adapters that were meant for starting fires instead of powering a laptop,
but it seems to work.  ;)

The laptop had an ancient version of Ubuntu on it.  I briefly tried Ubuntu
again a long time ago because the Fedora installer could not install with
so little ram.  I wanted to avoid burning a cd, so I created a directory
called boot2 and put the kernel and initial ramdisk in that.  I put a
thumb drive with the filesystem on it in the usb slot and used the
existing grub to boot that kernel and filesystem.  Once it was up, I
deleted everything on the hard drive and untar'd the files I wanted from
the thumb drive.  I ran grub-install and rebooted.  I messed up a few
things in the grub configuration so I used grub's editor to fix them and
then updated grub.conf when it booted.  I also learned that edd=off is a
great thing to add to the kernel command line for old boxes that don't
support it.  Saves an extra 5 minutes or so of probing for things that
aren't there.

As for the thumb drive, I was frustrated with the crappy adaptation of
live cd's to thumb drives, so I made my own from "scratch".  Basically, a
thumb drive is the same as a hard drive.  I installed grub on the thumb
drive, created the partition table and filesystems.  Then I took a system
I installed in a virtual machine and put it onto the thumb's file system. 
I removed all the files below all of the magical mount points like proc
and devfs.  That's basically it.

David.

> David,
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> You inspired me.  I pulled out a 700mhz celeron laptop with 192Mb ram
>> and a 10G hard drive.  I installed Fedora 14 on it.  It works fine.  I'm
>> using XFCE4 and the desktop environment.  I can even play flv movies
>> with
>> no trouble with mplayer.  This should be perfect for entertaining the
>> kids on those 10 hour drives to Nebraska to visit the inlaws.
>
> Wow, an older laptop with a 10 hour battery life... amazing! :)  Ok, I'm
> guessing you have a cigarette lighter to AC adapter box of some kind... or
> a vehicle that has that built in?
>
>> Note that the installer won't work.  I installed it in a VM on a larger
>> box and then tar'ed it up.  I created an ext3 partition and untar the
>> files there.  I installed grub and tweaked it until the kernel loaded.
>
> That sounds like an interesting install strategy.  I'd love to hear more.
> How did you get the files over there?  Take the hard drive out and connect
> it to another system?  Or did you boot off of some LiveCD like the
> rescue/netinstall CD?
>
>> I did something similar to create a bootable thumb drive.  The nice
>> thing
>> about this thumb drive as oppose to the ones other people make is that
>> there is not compressed static image with a writeable overlay.  It's
>> much
>> faster.
>
> Is that laptop capable of booting from USB?
>
>> If anybody wants one of my bootable thumb images, I'll be at the next
>> meeting and we can copy it.
>
> How did you create it?
>
> TYL,
> --
> Scott Dowdle
> 704 Church Street
> Belgrade, MT 59714
> (406)388-0827 [home]
> (406)994-3931 [work]
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