[geeks] Dos and similar games

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 05:02:15PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> You are talking about what I usually try to call the graphics card.  I
> am talking about an actual video input and output card.

ok.

> 
> We aren't running X11 at all.

If you don't need it, it's probably better that way. 
 
> We've been using CHROOTs on disk based Ubuntu machines to build software
> for our embedded x86 LFS systems.

Sounds the same for me, but due to a mistake made a while ago, it's
an FC5 system.

> We use Ubuntu for assorted machines at work, and I certainly wish we
> built .debs for the stuff we were installing on them.  One of these days
> either I or the IT guy will figure it out.

That's a good idea. The way DSL works from USB devices is that it
uses the BIOS to boot it as if it were a disk drive. It came with syslinux
installed, it did not work for me, so I used grub. Since the USB stick is
an MS/DOS file system, it reads the kernel as a file starts it up uses
a small ramdisk with a shell device drivers etc. 
Eventually you end up with the compressed file system mounted as /KNOPPIX
and readwrite files in /ramdisk. 

Grub is nice because once you install it, it finds the kernel file
on the file system by name at boot time, so it's much easier to change.
So far all of the changes I've had to make have been to the compressed
file system, so there has been no work on the Kernel side.

Once I have a stable hardware platform I'll build a specific kernel
for it. This is nothing new to me, I've been building (and occasionaly
patching) Linux kernels since 1995. I'll also start over again with my
own debian based system. 

Geoff.

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