I did get the cdrom to boot in a pentium 133 with 500 meg HDD. I had to set the CDRom as Master and the HDD drive as slave. I also used a debian rescue/boot disk to partition the drive with an ext2 filesystem. After the cdrom found the HDD, located at /dev/hdb1, it resised the partition to maximum size and put a flag on the partition that was "NC". after that it untarred the /flash direcory structure to the drive, installing the defaults for a new install. I had to reboot with the rescue cd and reinstall an XTerm.desktop icon in the /flash/desktop/Advanced Tools/Xterminal directory that pointed to /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm. Then I created /flash/web/.bashrc to set my user enviroment. I havent figured out how to start /tools/bash instead of /bin/bash withhout editing the .iso and reburning, this is easily done from a cli as the first command. Then my ~/.bashhistory works as expected. It works well for what I intended it to be. Simply web access and web mail for the kids. The editor vi does work as expected or I can touch a file and then use echo"some text to the file" >~/the_file_I_want. In any directory that is writeable by web (the default user). This is where the bootdisk came in handy. I did have to edit the /etc/passwd file while booting in rescue mode before chmoding any files or directories on /dev/hdb1 for the web user. His user/group ID is 100. I added a line that looked like web::100:100:Web User,,,:/home/web:/bin/bash to the last line while booted in rescuemode. This allowed chmod to find the correct user and group ids for the default NIC user once booted into NIC's version of Debian. If I can crack root on it, I can mount a directory over /lib/modules with the modules needed for the Linux kernel 2.2.15 and use more of the hardware in the old machine wityhout having to try to match the Hware to the modules.
Somehow when I wrote this it sounded much more coherant and much less like my previous ramblings. | |
