Red Hat 8.0, Firewire, Booting
 

I have a laptop provided by my employer with XP on it and they won't let me partition the HD. But I would like to run Red Hat 8.0.

They will, however, provide a Firewire hard drive and PCMCIA controller. I have another Linux box with similar hardware configuration that I can use to format the Firewire drive as ext3 and to build Linux.

My assumption about the best way to proceed is:


Build a kernel with Firewire support compiled in.

Boot from floppy with initrd using this kernel.

Mount the Firewire drive.

Continue the boot sequence using the Firewire drive.

Questions:

1. Is this technically feasible?

2. Any good pointers to references to help with this?

3. What's the correct point in the boot sequence to mount the Firewire drive?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.

Man, I don't mean to bash on someone I don't even know, but your employer sure seems... loaded and dumb. They won't let you use free tools to chop up the exisiting drive on your system, but will provide you with expensive hardware to use instead.

Well, lucky you I guess :)

There are some options, for the most part I would look at these 2 existing threads, and this link:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=46528

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=31285

And

http://linuxmobile.sourceforge.net/

I think those should help you to at least get the ball rolling, if you have questions, go ahead and post em up.

Cool

Might be to his advantage after all. Especially if XP corrupts itself and they go and use one of those so-called ``recovery'' CDs. His nice Linux partition would go bye-bye.

Firewire, Booting, etc
 

First, a word of defense for my employer (who shall remain nameless in this thread): this is the classic tradeoff of supporting a standard user environment and a custom development environment. They want all the "user" boxes to be identical. Easier to administer, and less hassle if you need to exchange machines at some point. Don't want to frighten some sales rep with Grub.

The work I'm doing that requires Linux is closer to development, so there's a different support model and also a different budget for the hardware. They'd also happily provide me with a separate laptop just for Linux, but I consider it a worthwhile challenge to do this job on a $300 budget rather than $2k. With some pain, I could even manage 90% of the job on the hated Windows, but Linux networking is far more flexible and that matters greatly for what I'm trying to do. And, as pointed out in some of the threads that were posted here, the removable-media approach can leave you completely independent of the box you're running on. There are many advantages to that, especially to someone like me who visits many different clients, not all of whom let me connect my own computer to their network. Somehow they regard a box with their "own" MAC address differently, even when the outcome is identical either way. Whatever.

Veering wildly offtopic, I think that it's a good thing that Linux can thrive in a mixed environment, because it subverts the monopoly while demonstrating flexibility that Windows just doesn't give you. This goes a long way towards dispelling FUD.

Back to the subject at hand-- I think there's definitely enough here to get me started. I'll be getting familiar with the mkinitrd utility and also taking a hard look at how those USB-cigar-drive-bootable images are constructed. I'll have a lot more space to play in, but conceptually it's really very much the same deal.