I have an ancient (1995 vintage) Pentium I machine with DOS and Windows 95 (for retrogaming) multibooted alongside Linux. The Linux distribution in use had been D*mn Small Linux, but that has only a v2.4 kernel, and because I switch between OS's on the machine fairly often and the BIOS is absolutely glacial about posting, I'd like to be able to use kexec to cut the BIOS out of the loop. Kexec, however, is only available on 2.6 or later kernels. The problem has been finding a distribution that both has a 2.6 kernel and will fit in RAM on the machine in question (40 MiB).
I had been experimenting around with SliTaz, and had run across some roadblock (this was a while ago, so I don't recall exact details), when someone on the SliTaz IRC suggested that Debian itself will run in 40 MiB, but that its installer won't. So I yanked the hard drive, installed Debian Sqeeze on another machine, then moved it back to the target machine. The default kernel for Squeeze, however, gives up waiting for the root filesystem and drops me to an initramfs prompt. Some Googling revealed that the issue is likely related to missing drivers for old PATA controllers in the squeeze kernel, then I got a new job and didn't have any time to mess with the machine for quite a while.
I came back to the issue recently and put the drive back in the machine I had installed Debian from, compiled a custom kernel with all the non-manufacturer-specific IDE/PATA drivers I could find compiled in, installed the new kernel, and tried moving the drive back to the target machine. I now get some new errors with the new kernel (for instance "hda: drive not ready for command"), but still end up timing out on the root filesystem and getting dumped to an initramfs prompt.
So, I have a few questions:
- Can anybody suggest kernel configuration settings or kernel command line options that might help? I've attached the .config for my current kernel configuration.
- Would I have better luck with legacy hardware support with a previous version of Debian, or the same version with a downgraded kernel?
- Alternatively, can anyone mention a better distribution for this machine? Requirements are 2.6 kernel, ability to fit in 40 MiB of RAM (I do have a swap partition, so this isn't a hard limit, but the working set needs to be small enough that the machine doesn't spend all its time thrashing swap), and a lightweight X environment. Preferably the installer should also run in 40 MiB, but that's at least somewhat negotiable.
config.tar.gz
Bookmarks