Dells, APIC, ReiserFS, custom boot-floppies and bootable CDs, oh my!
I need help. I have a problem. I have Dell laptops to support. "Dude,
you're getting a piece of crap BIOS!"
Anyway, I need ReiserFS for the root FS on these systems, and I need the
ability for the users to install it themselves from scratch (don't
ask). Unfortunately, the release bf2.4 flavor kernel image enables
APIC, which tickles the crappy BIOS, which responds by locking up tight,
so the released boot-floppies and CD image are useless to me. And, of
course, the "noapic" boot option doesn't work for some reason (several
people out there have noted this but no-one has an idea why).
I do have an old, old, old Debian 3.0 Unofficial test CD image with
boot-floppies images that don't have APIC enabled, but it's severely out
of date--which complicated the install, so I can't use them.
Now, as I see it, I need to do these things:
1) Compile 2.4.18-bf2.4 without APIC support. I can do this in my sleep.
2) Put the custom kernel image above on the boot-floppies. I'm not
exactly clear on how to do this; do I simply copy it to the disk
replacing linux.bin (and running rdev.sh), or should I get the
boot-floppies build scripts to include it? If the latter, how?
3) Build a new CD image (disc 1 would be enough; my users don't have to
know that disc 5 is bootable too 8) containing the customized bf
images. I have no clue how to proceed on this one, and I can't find any
documentation on it.
Can anyone help? Should I go to another list? Or should I shoot the
users and go live in a hut?
-- Cerebus
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