🚀 go-pugleaf

: My question is how do I make a boot disk when I am *in* Linux? And though I
: have read the man pages for LILO, it still doesn't seem to want to install
: (I was hesitant with 5.2 so preferred the disc) and right now, I reallllllly
: want it!

: If LoadLin is as effective as the other methods, how do I make a better
: kernel for my system? Or kernel image is more what I mean I think... what
: needs to be done? I know that some might say to go and read the man pages,
: and I will, if you can tell me the names of the commands that I need to read
: about!

The best thing to do is probably to recompile your kernel.  You can make a
bootdisk with your existing kernel by finding the file called vmlinuz
(usually in the root or /boot directory) and running

dd if=<path/vmlinuz> of=/dev/fd0

while logged in as root.

However, recompiling the kernel allows you to tailor it to your needs.  To
do this:

cd /usr/source/linux
make xconfig (if you're in X... otherwise use make menuconfig, or make
		config if neither of these work)

Now go through the various options for the kernel.  If you compile a
functionality into the kernel itself (by pressing "Y"), then that
capability will always be in the kernel.  If you choose to compile the
it as a module ("M" ie _M_aybe I'll use it someday...), then you'll have
to load that module into the kernel using insmod <module> to use it.  The
advantage of this is that it cuts down the size of your kernel.  If you
choose "N", you'll have to recompile the kernel if you want it to use that
capability.  If you have any hardware which isn't that straightforward to
configure, (eg Zip disks, CD-R drives, etc) you might want to take a look
at various HOWTO's (should be somewhere under /usr/doc if they're
installed -- if they're not installed, then do so!).

Then type:

make mrproper
make dep
make clean
make bzdisk (making sure you have a blank floppy in the drive -- this
		creates your bootdisk)
make modules
make modules_install

Then shutdown, and boot from your newly created disk.

NB Please make sure you keep your original bootdisk :)

--
gary

=========================================================================

Chris Morris:
   Do you agree that basically a fox is like a football and the
   hunters are basically charging after a red furry ball, but it's a ball
   that can run, or outwit a dog and it's a ball that the players won't
   head or kick, but that they'll rip it to pieces with their teeth,
   baying and howling and smearing their faces with guts?

Gary Numan:
   Yeah, I think very much along those lines, yeah

Radio One, Call 1FM debate on Fox-Hunting and humanity

Equality7-2521 wrote:

> I recently installed the mighty RedHat 6.0 and it is great! The only thing
> is though that when it gets to the make a boot floppy stage, it fails, so
> after much toying around with all sorts of stuff, I used Loadlin with a
> kernel image. This works OK, i.e. I can get into Red Hat, though there are
> plenty of errors in the start up (in nice red colour!).
>
> My question is how do I make a boot disk when I am *in* Linux? And though I
> have read the man pages for LILO, it still doesn't seem to want to install
> (I was hesitant with 5.2 so preferred the disc) and right now, I reallllllly
> want it!
>
> If LoadLin is as effective as the other methods, how do I make a better
> kernel for my system? Or kernel image is more what I mean I think... what
> needs to be done? I know that some might say to go and read the man pages,
> and I will, if you can tell me the names of the commands that I need to read
> about!
>
> C.

I'm new to linux myself, and in my toying with the consept of boot disks I
found that if you dump the file cdrom/images/boot.img (on the linux 5.2 disk)
straight to the floppy disk ("cat boot.img > /dev/fd0") you can boot it...  I'm
still looking into it.

If you wanna learn about boot disks in general read Bootdisk-HOWTO (or some
name similar to that, I forget.. <shrug>)

Hope I was of some assistance

Hi,
    I boot LINUX from disk at the moment (I can't get it to boot from disk, but
that is a different story and I am happy with floppy boot for now) and the
kernel and boot disk were made during installation of my SUSE 5.1 version of
LINUX. I have a MO SCSI machine and I want to be able to mount disks formatted
using my laptop/PC as VFAT. Mounting and creating ext2 filesystems is fine, but
it won't do it for VFAT. I have seen some patches and loaded them onto my
machine.
    Here are some questions:

   1) Is there anyway to say compile a new kernel in the same way that the
current one has been compiled (the kernel comes from the installation cd ????
but why does it work and how do I find out how it was compiled ???)
   2) the boot disk is minix filesystem and has a lilo.conf and another file
(from memory) and vmlinuz. Do I just create a new kernel (called vmlinux) and
copy that to the floopy over-writing the old one ??
  3) If I have to compile a new kernel, how do I decide on the options as there
seem to be so many - is there a default configuration for SCSI that uses
modules ?
  4) The kernel can be too big to fit on a floppy - is there anyway round this
(the kernel has been made with make zImage or make bzImage and is still bigger
that a floppy if I give it certain options)



thanks



andy

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