H.J.Lu's bootable root disk for LINUX.
This version is for 5.25 inch floppies
only. Use this to upgrade your system
to 0.98.5 or to "test drive" LINUX the
multi-tasking FREEWARE UNIX. Note: the
3.5 inch format has more files than
this smaller 5.25 inch floppy version.

Linux Bootable Root Disk [HJ release]

Introduction
------------
This is a bootable root disk for Linux. The kernel is 0.98 patch level 5.
There are some basic binaries on the root disk, all of which are linked
with the C library 4.2. There is a light version of the shared image 4.2,
lite.so.4.2, which doesn't have sun rpc, curses and gdbm. This kernel has
TCP/IP enabled. But I don't have an Ethernet card. Please consult the NET
channel and modify /usr/etc/inet/*.

There are two new users on the root disk, halt and shutdown, log in as
halt or shutdown without password will halt or shutdown your computer
respectively.

You can use this disk to install a bootable root partition on your
hard drive.

The root disk is on tsx-11.mit.edu under pub/linux/GCC/rootdisk.


Distribution File Format
------------------------
There are two versions of the root disk. The first is in the file
3rootdisk.Z, and is for a 3.5" floppy. The second file is 5rootdisk.Z,
and is for a 5.25" floppy. Because the 5.25" floppy is smaller than
the 3.5", some files are not present in the 5.25" version.

Because of the lack of space on the 5.25" version, there are only a few
free blocks left, and you may have trouble using vi. To solve this you
can delete any files you don't need from the root disk.

This is a partial list of what is on the root disk.

1. ksh 4.7 (buggy, but save quite a lot disk spaces, about 100K)
2. gnu tar 1.10 (tar.Z) (not present in the 5.25" version.)
3. compress 4.2.4
4. elvis 1.6
5. doshell, chmod, chown, cp, ls (color), mv, rm, and ln.
6. mount, umount, swapon and swapoff (new version).
7. more (may not be present in the 5.25" version.)
8. ps, free, tload, w, top, fuser, fstat, memmap and uptime
9. mkfs, mkswap (may not be in 5.25" version.), fsck and fdisk
10. efsck and mkefs (alpha 10.1)
11. expr (for /dev/MAKEDEV)
12. grep or fgrep (for /usr/etc/inet/rc.net)

Building the Bootable Root Floppy
---------------------------------
1. uncompress [3|5]rootdisk.Z.
2. rawrite or dd the file to a formatted floppy disk.

You now have a root floppy, which you can use to boot your system.


Installing a Bootable Root Partion on Your Hard Drive
-----------------------------------------------------
You can use this disk to install a bootable root partition on your
hard drive. You will need to create a root partition on your disk,
using the DOS fdisk command, or another hard drive utility.

If you are creating the partition, be sure to record its size in
bytes. If the partition already exists, you can find its size using
fdisk.

If you want to install Linux on partition /dev/hdxx, whose size
is yyyy K bytes, do:

mkfs /dev/hdxx yyyyy
mount /dev/hdxx /mnt
(cd /; cp -av . /mnt)

Edit /mnt/etc/fstab to ensure that /dev/hdxx will be mounted as root.
There are some examples in /mnt/etc/fstab.

Note: If you are using 5.25" version, please mount your hard drive and
make sure there are some temperary spaces for `elvis/vi'. One way to do
is tell `elvis/vi' to use the temperary directory on your hard drive.


Next, use lilo to set up your hard drive to boot either Linux or DOS:

cd /mnt/etc/lilo
rm map boot.????
./lilo -r /mnt -b /dev/hdxx -i /etc/lilo/boot.b -v -v -v /vmlinux

You will also need to make the partition you wish to boot from active,
and make all other partitions non-active. You can do this using fdisk.
You can now boot Linux from your hard drive. Installing other packages
should be easy, since you have tar and compress on your hard drive, and
you can boot Linux from your hard drive.

Note: If you don't like the color ls, you can make `ls -f' or `ls --no-color'
as an alias for ls.


Booting Other OS's
---------------
There is a file called mboot.tar.Z under pub/linux/GCC/rootdisk on
tsx-11.mit.edu. Running mboot from a DOS partition on your first hard
drive will enable you to choose from a menu to boot from up to 4 partitions
on your first hard drive. Read the documentation in mboot.tar.Z for details.


Other Linux Disks
-----------------
The next thing you may want to do is install the Linux Base System,
which contains many system utilities. Please read README.basedisk
in the base system directory for details.

The Linux Base System is on tsx-11.mit.edu under pub/linux/GCC/basedisk.

The only thing missing from the Linux Base System is ispell 3.09.
It is in a separate file, under pub/linux/GCC/basedisk.

I will try to update my root disk regularly with Linus' new kernel.

This root disk works on my machine with 100MB IDE drive. I don't know
anything about your machine or SCSI. Good luck.

Correct me if I am wrong. Tell me about your story.


Thanks.

H.J.
[email protected]
11/26/09