I finally managed to replace the kernel in debian's bootdisk. To recap, I wanted to change it because it doesn't have drivers for the SCSI and ether cards on the machine. Here's what one has to do.
The version is important. I'm installing 1.3.57, which seems to be the most recent version usable in a production machine. To get the ramdisk to work, just compile the kernel with support for it. You must pass several options to the kernel at boot time, so the best is to edit syslinux.cfg. Include the following line: APPEND root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 rw The root= isn't necessary if you use rdev, but since you're editing the options you may just as well put it... The second one tells the kernel to load the root filesystem to the ramdisk. The 3rd is for it to prompt for the root floppy, otherwise it tries to load the filesystem from the boot one. The Documentation/ramdisk.txt file in the kernel source tree says the prompt_ramdisk=1 is the default and thus not necessary, but this is wrong :-(. The last option is for the kernel to mount the ramdisk root filesystem read-write, otherwise it mounts it read-only and dinstall fails. The BootPrompt howto says that the default mounting is read-write, but this is also wrong! :-( :-( Another point: the new ramdisk can load a compressed filesystem, so we can put more stuff in the root floppy. Bruce, I'd VERY MUCH like to see ncftp there, so that we can easily clone another machine by just doing get -R whole directories!!! Now back to finally install debian... Carlos
