One thing that bothers me is that, why SLAX can run under MS-DOS.

I arrange DISKless CPU(no hardisk at all) with LINUX OS in.

Funny to find out that at the first boot is the the MS-dos OS running as MBR system. After that I can choose LINUX as the 2nd OS wich I build from the batch file process.

Can anyone make me stop laughing?
I'm rather old so sometimes I forget what've I done.

Regards,
Boby.

mm:...
Lemme make it clear:

I had MS-DOS installed on a Memory card (wich is bootable system) on a PC without any HARDISK installed. Then I copied the whole SLAX system into the Solid State Drive. After a very few adjustment SLAX is online.
I can choose, what to run ; DOS or SLAX.

Was SLAX build from MS-DOS?of course not....come on give me a picture.

Note;
This post include answer to my past thread on Diskless CPU/Industrial CPU.
I made this post from Konqueror(3.5.2) from a Diskless CPU.

Currently I'm experimenting LINUX on a Diskless system(solid state drive) son any kind of comment would be greatly appreciated.

Regards.

i wish i could help you, but i can't... but i'm posting here to ask for some precisions though

what do you call diskless system ?? there has to be a disk there, right ? (be it magnetical, flash or whatever)

btw, diskless CPU seems to be a nonsense to me


ps : err... about your problem, maybe you didn't delete MS-DOS and just added SLAX into the drive .??

There is a program called LOADLIN that boots Linux from DOS. It was created before the ability to boot from CD or DVD.

Shautieh, a diskless setup means that it does not use any moving parts like a hard drive, floppy, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, etc. A diskless setup uses ROM, EEPROM, NAND Flash and other mediums that does not have any moving parts.

I am not really sure what you want to have. I have some experience with several variants:

1. I assume that you mean using solid state disk (like Transcend IDE flash or similar). These are devices that you can basically plug in to IDE interface. They are not using rotating magnetic plates, but flash memory (or some other kind). Their characteristics are much smaller size (<1GB), better speed than hard drives and longer life. Also they seem to have issues with number of write cycles.

For this approach you can basically install most of linux distros on device directly. Device is discovered as ordinary hard disk, and not much problems here. Problems are related to two things:
- Size of device is restricting
- If device is sensitive to number of writes, you will want to limit it as much as possible, usually by putting everything you can to read-only and using ram-disk.

In my company we have created such distros for devices that are used as appliance, and it is not so hard to be done. A simple explanation is that we are mounting root fs read-only and creating symbolic links to ramdisk for every file/folder that needs to be written to. Of course it is not so usefull for normal use.

2. Other approach that is truly diskless workstation is to use network boot. Most of motherboard today support it. You can set-up machine to boot over ethernet by getting necessary information from dhcp server. We have created such setups. Once powered on worstation asks DHCP for IP address and than retrieves initial files using tftp protocol. After initialization root rs is mounted via NFS protocol, and from there you can work normally. Special kernel configuration is required for this setup (root-over-nfs and some other settings). Problem with this approach is that you need network and you still need at least one machine with hard disk to be used as network server.

Fedora is providing all necessary files to setup installation server in similar way. You configure dhcp and tftp server and than you can install Fedora over local network directly. Very useful when you need to install on a machine that doesn't have any optical device.

thanks, that's what i thought but i wasn't sure

Precise answer Electro.
Thx


I knew what what Diskless is; I invent the thecnique from myself not from the net, it's my nature.

I aim for the 'Diskless Client/workstation' long time ago though I was just getting an ADAPTEC 'iSCSI'.

Unfortunately Linux does not have many support on this high_end NIC.

Thx for all the big input....
Regards