Hello, Digby and Kevin!So far the agreement between you guys and my other linux-friends seems to be that I should pull the hard drive and install on another system. I will do that as a last resort, because I will probably have a nightmare of a time configuring it on the libretto with all the devices.
So, before I do that, I'd like to explore other options. Digby, you said that you installed Debian from SuSE using a hard drive install. What did you do? I am trying a hard drive install, but I am failing, as I described above. Will the difference be that I do it with loadlin and you did it with lilo? Can I get lilo going from dos?
I have a 4G hard drive. Dos can only see 2 G of it, so I partitioned the other 2 G into ext2. I left 8M at the end of the disk for sleep/wake cycles (I read somewhere that's where libreto wants them on 4G drives...). I used root=/dev/ram, root=/dev/hda2, root=/dev/hdb2 and many other permutations of /dev/hd** with the same result. The only difference from trying to mount it in ram, is that for RAM-mount it complains
cramfs: wrong magic and for /dev/hd** mount that message does not appear.I have 32 M of RAM, and during RAMDISK driver initialization (loadlin-boot method) it allocates 16 RAM disks with 8192 K size, 1024 blocksize. Is that a little much? Maybe my memory is corrupted somewhere, I'll check it out.
I have pcmcia network cards and internet access though a modem on another machine, but I have no faith in being able to get pcmcia to work at such early stage of install. I could install windows95 from hard drive, install pcmcia ethernet card, and try to do a network install from my linux desktop at home. But, I have no idea how to configure things on the desktop to do that. Besides, I would only be able to do that if I could boot from hard drive, which I can't! I don't want to install over a modem from debian websites, because I do not trust security of my isp.
If all else fails, I could probably get you a bootable Linux partition image which we would just need to get coppied into a partition on your hard drive.
How would that work? Luda