Small Linux
----------
By Steven G. 1998
http://smalllinux.netpedia.net/
Introduction
------------
Small Linux is a two disk distribution of an minimal Linux.
It has two objectives:
- create a minimum distribution that will boot.
- to have a distribution that will boot on a machine with 2 meg.
Quick Start
----------
You'll need about
20Mb in drive C: during installation.
Small Linux is distributed as 2 raw disk images and doc files
You can download
the two disk images and get two files:
boot_1.0.9 and
root_1.0.9
Or, you can download a gzipped file.
If you have the
gzipped file, you need to decompress
the smalllinux.tar.gz
file with the command:
tar zvxf
smalllinux.tar.gz
Untar and unzip
the files. Make a Boot disk and a Root disk.
Then boot up
the computer with the Boot disk first.
After the startup
of the system is finished you're presented
with the login
prompt. The only user available is root, without
password.
Quick Start Notes
-----
We do not intend to give herein a course on Unix. You should read one
of the many books on Unix/Linux, attend a Unix course or gather
info and docs on the Net. We can give some hints though
- Linux has support for virtual terminals. You can access them
by pressing ALT + Fx, where Fx is a function key from F1 to F8
- some commands in Linux are similar to their DOS counterparts
if not equal ( dir=dir, cp=copy, rm=del, cat=type )
- the equivalent of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are the files
/etc/inittab and the files under directory /etc/rc.d
To set up swap space for better performance:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=8192
# mkswap /swapfile 8192
# sync
# swapon /swapfile
You can test that you have
more memory with the "free"
Full Small Linux Contents
1.0. The Small Linux package
2.0. Linux operating system
3.0. Installing Small Linux
3.1. Distribution set
3.2. Preliminary information needed
3.3. How Small Linux works ?
3.4. System requirements
3.5. Installation
3.5.1. Making disks
3.5.2. Using disks
4.0. What you get ?
5.0. Using Small Linux
5.1. After installation
5.2. Booting the computer
5.3. Making backups
5.4. Mounting a hard drive
5.5. Mount Additional filesystems
5.6. Virtual terminals
6.0. Security
7.0. Author's comments
8.0. Bugs
9.0. DISCLAIMER
1.0. Small Linux
Small Linux is a minimal distribution based on the Linux
operating system by Linus Torvalds. See Section 2.0
for getting information on Linux.
Small Linux will never to be a respectable package.
No updates are promised. The user is responsible for the
security of the system as well as possible hardware
and software failures during installation and opera-
tion.
We wish to have an X Windows terminal environment
with a minimum of 4 meg of space requirements.
Keep watching.
This package is freely distributable. This document
should be included in all copies.
X Window System is a trademark of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. See section 2.0.
Most of the software is covered by
GNU General
Public License and so the source code must be
available freely. We have taken the binaries from
Debian and sources of Debian are available from
http://www.debian.org/
Jump to chapter 3 if you want to install Small Linux imme-
diately.
2.0. Linux operating system, and small utilities
For detailed description of Linux,
get Linux
Information Sheet (INFO-sheet) and META-FAQ from
ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/OS/Linux/doc/INFO-SHEET
ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/OS/Linux/doc/META-FAQ*
or
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/INFO-SHEET
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/META-FAQ
Small Linux is not a complete Linux system.
3.0. Installing Small Linux
3.1. Distribution set
Small Linux comes with two floppies. The first one contains
Linux kernel and boot parameters. The second
floppy disk includes basic binaries and files needed
to set up the computer.
3.2 Preliminary information needed
You need at least 2 meg of Ram and a 386 intel compatible
processor.
3.3. How Small Linux works
Small Linux boots the Kernel off the Boot floppy, then
mounts the Root floppy as the root device with runable
utilities.
3.4. System requirements
For Linux a minimum requirement is a computer with a
386SX processor.
No hard disk space is required. If a hared disk is available
it should be used.
A swap partition on the first ide hard drive will be used
if it is available.
The device support in Linux is compiled into
the
kernel.
3.5. Installation
3.5.1. Making diskettes
You need two preformatted HD disks with
no bad
sectors. It might be useful to label disks as "Boot 1.0.9
Small Linux" and "Root 1.0.9 Small Linux". In dos you need
RAWRITE.EXE for writing images to disks.
C:\> rawrite
Here you should type your floppy drive letter and
give "boot_1.0.9" as the name of disk image.
C:\> rawrite
Here you should type your floppy drive letter and
give "root_1.0.9" as the name of disk image.
In UN*X the task is similar:
% tar zxvf smalllinux.tar.gz
% dd if=boot_1.0.9 of=/dev/fd0
% dd if=root_1.0.9 of=/dev/fd0
3.5.2. Using disks
To install Small Linux
(1) boot from the boot disk
(2) insert second disk when it is asked for
(3) log in as root
(4) explore
4.0. What you get ?
32 bit Linux multitasking multiuser environment. a
minimal set of utilities including cp, ls, mount and
plus basic binaries including ash a small shell.
5.0. Using Small Linux
5.1. After installation
After installation all configuration information is
saved on the second disk. Even if you would like to
do *not* write-protect your floppies. This will soon
lead to a system crash. Also the removing
of the
second floppy disk from the drive during a session
is fatal. This disk contains binaries and configu-
ration files which are vital for operation.
5.2. Booting the computer
In multitasking environment several programs
are
executed at the same time. The operating system has
also disk buffers in the memory, which contain data
waiting to be written on disk. These are some of the
reasons why shutting down is a complex process. For
this purpose there is a special command, which you
should use when you want to end your the session. It
is called
reboot
You should give this command only after
you have
finished all your applications. The rebooting takes a
little time and you can follow the system
sending
signals to various programs. When you see the message
from your graphics adaptor it is safe to
turn the
power off.
The ctrl-alt-del key sequence is monitored by Linux
and shortly after this command has been given
the
rebooting process will start. This is fully equivalent
to the reboot command written by hand.
5.3. Making backups
If you want to make backups, you can mount your dos
hard disk using mount command and simply copy files
to some desired directory. Backuping
might be
necessary for your configuration files. Remember
that dos file system uses only 8+3 characters for a
file name. Also only capital letters are supported by
dos.
5.4. Mounting a hard drive
In Linux hard disks are treated as devices and the
location of the device files is the /dev directory.
IDE hard disks are devices /dev/hda and /dev/hdb,
which stand for the first hard disk (BIOS C disk) and
the second hard disk (BIOS D disk) respectively. A
single hard disk is usually divided into
several
partitions. Each of these partitions can be accessed
separately and for this purpose there are devices
/dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3 etc. for the C drive
and /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb2 etc. for the D drive.
A partition can be mounted on an empty directory. In
Small Linux disk there are some directories in / for this
purpose. These directories are:
mnt
The next task is to find the correct partition for
mounting. This can be done by using the fdisk prog-
ram. Give a command
% fdisk -l
The output should look like this:
Disk /dev/hda: 14 heads, 62 sectors, 768 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 868 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Begin Start End
Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 203
203 767 245210 5
Extended
/dev/hda2 14
14 202 82026 83 Linux
native
/dev/hda3 4
4 13 4340
1 DOS 12-bit FAT
/dev/hda4 * 1
1 3 1271
a OPUS
/dev/hda5 * 203
203 462 112809 7
OS/2 HPFS
/dev/hda6 463
463 500 16491+ 82 Linux
swap
/dev/hda7 501
501 767 115877+ 83 Linux native
Disk /dev/hdb: 8 heads, 35 sectors, 872 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 280 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Begin Start End
Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1
1 586 82022+ 6 DOS
16-bit >=32M
/dev/hdb2 587
587 871 39900 5
Extended
/dev/hdb5 587
587 871 39882+ 83 Linux
native
This is a sample partition table. We find that
there are two dos file systems we can use. With the
command
% mount -t msdos /dev/hda3 /dos
we mount the dos boot partition on the /dos direc-
tory. Now this partition can be used for writing and
reading data. After finished, the partition can be
released by
% umount /dos
The proper releasing procedure is important, because
otherwise the files might not be written correctly on
the hard disk. The reboot program will take care of
unmounting, if you forget to do it yourself.
When you know the correct partition device on your
computer, give command
% mount -t msdos /dev/hd?* /dos
where ? stands for the correct hard drive and * for
the partition number. The dos disk will be attached
to your Linux file system and you can use it as your
floppy disks. Remember the limitations of
file
names, though.
Unmount it with
% umount /dos
5.5. Mounting Additional filesystems
Small Linux is capable of mount many types of availble
filesystems, like msdos, minix, and ext2k. For major
work mounting of a hard disk is required.
Linux is a full operating system that is capable of
use many filesystems in a multitasking environment.
5.6. Virtual terminals
While running Linux in ascii mode, you can switch
to another terminal by
pressing keys Alt-F?
simultaneously, where ? can be from 1 to 6. This way
you can have six sessions open at the same time. Use
the who command to see the users currently logged in.
6.0. Security
No security measures have been take with Small Linux.
7.0. Authors' comments
Do not expect Small Linux to behave as well as a full
Linux Distribution. Users are encouraged to install
full Linux system on their computers.
We wish you good luck !
8.0. Bugs
Doubtless many. Feel free to contact the author, but
remember: we don't promise anything !
http://smalllinux.netpedia.org/
9.0. DISCLAIMER
a)
we do not support Small Linux
b)
we do not promise that Small Linux does anything
c)
Small Linux distroy may all your data
d)
we can not promise that Small Linux will not
distroy all human civilization
Thank you !
Steven G.