Re: Help on installing Deb 1.3.1 on Toshiba laptop
On 21 May, Philip Restuccia wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I sent a request for help on this topic a few days ago, but have
> received no responses
> as of yet. In case I wasn't clear enough on my needs the first time,
> I'm trying again.
> If you saw the first request and just don't know of anything that would
> help me, then I
> apologize for the duplication! :-)
I'm sorry. I didn't see your question the first time. I do try to
read most laptop-related questions.
> I purchased the Debian 1.3.1 binary/source CD set from LSL several
> months ago, and am
> finally getting to the actual installation (been *very* busy). What I
> would *really*
> like to be able to do is install Linux on a 1.5GB cartride in my Syquest
> SyJet removable
> drive, which I have attached to my Toshiba Satellite 105cs laptop via an
> Adaptec APA-1460A
> PCMCIA SCSI adapter, to which is also attached a Teac SCSI 16x CD-ROM
> drive. My laptop
> has a 504MB hard disk that has only the single partition it came with on
> it, and that has
> only about 170MB left on it; the Win95 stuff on it cannot be removed.
> The laptop also has
> 24MB of RAM.
The hardware sounds like it should be good; AFAIK everything is
supported by Linux.
> Is there any way possible that I can accomplish the installation on the
> SyJet? I have no
> real-mode card and socket services available on the machine, so my SCSI
> adapter (and thus
> the SyJet and CD-ROM drive) are invisible to DOS (at least to pure DOS;
> I can access them
> in a DOS-box under Win95 but this is obviously no good). Do any of the
> Linux installation
> utilies by any chance have built-in access to the PCMCIA cards? Is
> there any alternative?
OUCH! My guess is you may not have gotten any answers because this one
is a hard one. Problem number one: booting. In order to boot, you
will have to be able to see some of Linux at boot time. Not having any
experience with a PCMCIA SCSI card (I'm supposed to be getting a New
Media Bus Toaster in a couple of days), I don't know if you'll be able
to boot off that drive or not. The BIOS has to be able to see the
drive in order to be able to boot off it. Since the PCMCIA card hasn't
been initialized yet, it can't be recognized by the BIOS as a valid
bootable device. I suspect you'll need something to boot from the
internal hard drive and then bootstrap up to the external drive after
the PCMCIA drivers are loaded. Perhaps a boot floppy with a kernel and
the PCMCIA modules on it might do the trick, but I'm in *way* over my
head here. I have no idea how to go about such a thing. Even if you
boot from the internal hard drive, I think the kernel wants to mount
the swap partition and any other partitions you have *before* the
PCMCIA drivers are loaded :-(
Another major problem is that installation will be tricky. In short,
the PCMCIA drivers have to be running *before* the installation program
copies anything to the disk; I've installed Debian on 4 laptops in the
past 6 months and I've always had to add the PCMCIA support in myself.
This could be fixed by adding PCMCIA support and the appropriate SCSI
driver to the rescue disk, which I think amounts to solving the same
problem as the general booting problem with a floppy disk. Again, I'm
in over my head here.
Finally, on shutdown, the shutdown stuff wants to unload the PCMCIA
drivers before unmounting the drives; this means that every time you
boot up, you will at a minimum have to go through a fsck of the whole
Syquest drive.
The major difficulty is that the PCMCIA drivers have to be loaded
before you can get anything off the Syquest drive, and the PCMCIA
drivers are only available as kernel modules, and so aren't loaded
until too late in the boot process (and correspondingly get unloaded
too soon). If you could spare 10-15 megabytes for a bare install on the
internal hard drive and could figure out how to a) load the PCMCIA
drivers early or b) delay mounting the swap, /home, /usr and /var
partitions until later in the boot process, you could probably get away
with it. (On my system, I have just a little over 10 megabytes in
/boot, /bin, /sbin, /lib, /dev and /etc combined. I have 22 megabytes
in /root, which I probably shouldn't have there, and some miscellaneous
stuff in /tmp (maybe this should get a partition on the Syquest drive,
too?); then there is 1 gigabyte in the /usr partition and 1.5 gigabytes
in /home. /var needs some space because that is where new packages get
downloaded to before they get installed. Correspondingly, I have a
small partition mounted as the root partition, and two very large
partitions mounted under /home and /usr, and a medium sized partition
mounted under /var.
I'm sorry that this comes out so negative sounding; what you've asked
is (I think) fairly difficult, and is going to involve changing the
boot sequence for anything to work.
> Also, on an unrelated topic, I've been monitoring this list for a few
> days now (watching for
> a response to my initial request, and also attempting to learn as much
> as I can for when I
> finally get my system installed :-) and have seen mentioned many times a
> "hamm" system.
> What, exactly, is "hamm"?
This one has a much easier answer - "hamm" is the codename for Debian
2.0. So everyone running a "hamm" system is running the prerelease of
Debian 2.0. I'm running hamm on my main system because I need some of
the hardware support in the later version, and running it on the other
systems for consistency (so that I always have the same versions of the
same programs available to me).
--
Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux
Mathematics graduate student, Dartmouth College
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