The main problem is screen blanking. I can find no way to turn it off, save recompiling the kernel after modifying source.
Tomsrtbt dd already has progress indicators, use:
--iprogress='i' --oprogress='o' for example to spit out "i" on input blocks and "o" on output blocks.
That might work. I could make a little script thingie that figures out how many bytes are on the disk and change bs=BYTES to be 1/100 of that. then 100 o's or whatever would imply a full disk.
Not sure how good of an idea that is though.
The "setterm" command would work, but I am unable to compile a copy that uses libc5, and copying over the needed libraries from a rh9 machine just causes Out of Memory errors during the uncompressing.
Would it be possible for somebody to either offer a better suggestion to disable screen blanking (since in our case it limits the usefulness of the machine), or provide a setterm that will work if stuck into the initrd.bz2 of the ElTorito image?
The thing is, setterm just spits out strings to the terminal, so if you know what string it spits out to turn off blanking, you can just use an echo command and the literal control code string.. That is why setterm is not included, the workaround is good enough.. Um, for blank, the string looks to be printf("\033[9;%d]", opt_bl_min); where you want 0 to turn it off. So, just echo that string, and you have a replacement for setterm that is only 5 or 10 bytes long...
-TOm
Thank you much, that should work. I hadn't looked into it that closely, and had just done a few google searches. It seemed that the only methods to do it were setterm and changing a line in one of the kernel source files. I will report back if it doesn't work.
Thanks again
-stefan
-- Stefan Strandberg University of Wisconsin - Madison Computer Systems Lab [EMAIL PROTECTED]
