On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:55:35 -0400 Randy Barlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Dan Farrell wrote: > > Sounds like a fun project. Have you considered trying to get it to > > run without a har drive at all? I bet a server could provide NFS > > many times faster than the hard drive... > > Yeah, old hardware is fun to tinker with :) I got this machine for > free from my roommate so I figure what the heck, let's put Gentoo on > it! That does sound like a cool idea - hadn't thought of trying NFS. > How would one do something like that? I imagine you still need a > harddrive in there to get the boot process going (to start up grub) > and then you could configure grub to do the rest of the NFS stuff? > This box doesn't offer anything else like PXE, booting from USB. It > doesn't even have a CD-ROM or a floppy. Just a hard drive! > > - -- > Randy Barlow > http://electronsweatshop.com > First off I wanted to point out that this looks like a Pentium-class processor, not 386 or 486. While I'm sure it will happily act like a {3|4}86, it will also probably happily work as a pentium-mmx. I have never put gentoo on a 486 but I know it will work on a pentium farily well. If you cannot net-boot with PXE, you'll need to boot from something; I guess the hard drive is the only choice. All you'll need on the hard drive is grub, the kernel, and, optionally, any initial ramdisks or anything you require, or splash images, etc -- in short, the contents of the boot partition, and no more. Then you can create a directory for the installation on an NFS-capable server somewhere, and unzip the stage3, and chroot. You should be able to build for a pentium-type machine on any modern system, as long as it has 32-bit support. The next step is to configure the kernel to be able to automatically configure IP networking at boot time, and to allow the root fs on NFS, both in their respective categories in menuconfig. There is also a netboot.txt (i think...) file in the kernel Documentation that can explain the command-line syntax for specifying that the kernel boot with an NFS root and configure IP networking at boot time. Finally, you build the kernel, and the rest of the system, and then stick grub and the kernel image on the hard drive and you should be good to go! Your NFS server will have to provide the filesystem, so you'll have to set up an NFS file share. That's easy. Since you can't net-boot (that is, recieve kernel and such with TFTP through the PXE stuff) you won't need a TFTP server. You can use a static IP address, but if not, you'll need a dhcp server. If you want more help with net booting, just say so. Ive done it several times now. Another nice thing about this configuration is that as long as the NFS server can execute the same code as the diskless client (that is the processor in the server is more capable and not less), then you can build the system, and any packages thereafter, on the server and not on your super-slow off-brand pseudo-pentium ; ) I don't think i need to tell you how much nicer that will be for you. Best of luck, Dan -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
