Hi Raymond, Quoth Ingles, Raymond, > I've got Debian 2.2 mostly installed on an old laptop (486/50MHz, > 8MB RAM, 325MB HD). Actually, this is the second install - the first > got hosed by over-agressive hdparming. (I knew the risks... :-> ) I've just done the exact same thing on a very similar machine. It was very painful (debian certainly isn't built for low memory installs). dselect was the worst bit - It took literally half an hour just to show the packages, then wouldn't install them (using apt) because it kept on running out of memory :( While I'm a big fan of debian, and use it on all of my machines, and have introduced numerous people to it's charms, I'm beginning to think that it's not a good distribution for such a machine. I actually originally tried to use FreeBSD on the machine (which I really only use as a dumb terminal so I can read my email in bed...), but it said I didn't have a hard-drive! I think there are probably minimal distributions out there more suitable for such low-power machines. Of course, they wont be as nice as debian, but you might have more luck getting them installed. > Anyway, I've done a lot of things to conserve memory (reducing the > number of VCs, etc.) but I want to put a slimmer kernel on there (e.g., > no SCSI support, etc.) I compiled a new kernel for mine, which ended up being less than half of the size of the one on the boot disk. Unfortunately, my PCMCIA network card didn't like it, so I'm stuck with the original for the time being. > What I don't want to do is wait for that poor little machine to compile > 2.2.17. (The install is painful enough... it swapped continuously > all through it. "Please wait while modules are detected" ...go rake > leaves... come back, select "parport_pc"... wait... "Install this > module?" ...yes... go rake more leaves, and get ready for the > suffering that is dselect...) I actually started it compiling at 2am, went to bed, and it was finished in the morning when I got up at 9:30 (probably only just though). :) > So, I sic my K6-III 400 on the kernel source (configured for m486, of > course) and copy it over. Set up lilo to boot it as an alternate, fire > it up, and watch the kernel panic on boot. > > Even though I enabled loadable module support, none of the existing > modules on the laptop would load, nor would the PCMCIA stuff happen. > I suppose the modules were compiled with modversions or something. > > OK, anyway, how do I make a kernel on my desktop that will successfully > boot on my laptop, and then add PCMCIA to it? This thing isn't very > useful if I can't use my PCMCIA Ethernet card. The PCMCIA compile isn't quite as painful - I don't remember it taking too long. I believe that you should be able to do it on another machine, and I think the way to do it would be to use kernel-package. This compiles your kernel and modules and puts it all in a nice debian package, which you can then install with dpkg. I can't think of any other easy way to do it. Just do an apt-get install kernel-package and read the docs in /usr/share/doc/kernel-package. It's very easy to do. If you actually did use kernel-package, and had those problems, then I have no idea... cheers, damon -- Damon Muller | Did a large procession wave their torches Criminologist/Linux Geek | As my head fell in the basket, http://killfilter.com | And was everybody dancing on the casket... PGP (GnuPG): A136E829 | - TBMG, "Dead"
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