RE: Install on 4MB Atari TT
Hi,
>From: Sven Rudolph <sr1@os.inf.tu-dresden.de>
The Debian boot-floppies guy??
>I'm trying to install Debian on an Atari TT with only 4 MB RAM.
>
>I couldn't find a lowmem.bin for m68k.
Frank didn't do a lowmem.bin. What exactly is the difference to the regular
root.bin?
Anyway: your main problem is that the ramdisk image doesn't fit on a floppy. If
I recall right, there's about 300k free in the 1800k ramdisk. It should be
possible to trim it down so it fits on a floppy, and formatting the floppy
higher than 1440 woule make that easier.
Possible workaround: take the filesys-2.0-ELF-1440 ramdisk, dump it to floppy
and boot with 'root=/dev/fd0'. It's slow, but not impossible. Now you should be
able to mount the Debian ramdisk as loopback, and strip it down to the bare
minimum. Copying that to a second smaller loop filesystem should also work.
Just don't forget to activate a swap partition first thing.
If you have a partiton to spare: just dump the root.bin image to a disk
partition, should be faster than using a floppy.
>Thats why I tried to do everything that the lowmem would do by hand. I
>created the partitions.
>
>But I couldn't create /etc/swappartition, because the content of
What's /etc/swappartition?
>root.bin seems to be a big-endian minixfs. I haven't found a tool to
>byteswap the relevant entries in order to be able to mount it on i386.
I minix was never prepared for byteswapping, but check the m68k kernel source
anyway. Code to byteswap the filesystem metadata would go in fsck.minix just as
we have ext2 byteswap code in e2fsck. Andreas Schwab is the one to ask if it's
possible.
>Several potential solutions:
>- a root.bin as ext2
Waste of space ... But probably the fastest way to get you started, in case the
tips above don't help.
>- a lowmem.bin as created for i386
Seems we need it now :-)
>- a byte-swapping program for minixfs.
Except for your special case: who needs it?
Michael
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