LinuxQuestions.org
Welcome to the most active Linux Forum on the web.
Go Back   LinuxQuestions.org > Forums > Linux Forums > Linux - Distributions
User Name
Password
Linux - Distributions This forum is for Distribution specific questions.
Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Novell, LFS, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora - the list goes on and on... Note: An (*) indicates there is no official participation from that distribution here at LQ.

Notices


Reply
  Search this Thread
Old 02-15-2003, 03:37 PM   #1
alexbarnes
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Feb 2003
Distribution: Mandrake
Posts: 4

Rep: Reputation: 0
Arrow 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.
 
Old 02-22-2003, 08:26 PM   #2
MasterC
LQ Guru
 
Registered: Mar 2002
Location: Salt Lake City, UT - USA
Distribution: Gentoo ; LFS ; Kubuntu ; CentOS ; Raspbian
Posts: 12,613

Rep: Reputation: 69
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
 
Old 02-23-2003, 12:00 AM   #3
rnturn
Senior Member
 
Registered: Jan 2003
Location: Illinois (SW Chicago 'burbs)
Distribution: openSUSE, Raspbian, Slackware. Previous: MacOS, Red Hat, Coherent, Consensys SVR4.2, Tru64, Solaris
Posts: 2,849

Rep: Reputation: 553Reputation: 553Reputation: 553Reputation: 553Reputation: 553Reputation: 553
Quote:
Originally posted by MasterC
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.
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.
 
Old 02-23-2003, 01:09 AM   #4
alexbarnes
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Feb 2003
Distribution: Mandrake
Posts: 4

Original Poster
Rep: Reputation: 0
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.
 
  


Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off



Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Red Hat Enterprise ES 3 or 4 and Firewire Mc2102 Linux - Enterprise 5 03-27-2005 10:15 AM
External Firewire Drive Mount on Red Hat 9 Problem anilnatha Linux - Hardware 5 12-17-2003 02:02 PM
Red hat 9.0 not booting up nagakiranp LinuxQuestions.org Member Success Stories 2 07-22-2003 01:03 PM
Red Hat 8: Firewire Trouble General_Tso Linux - Hardware 0 02-11-2003 02:21 PM
booting red hat 7.2 from cd. Hachaso Linux - Software 1 04-21-2002 02:34 PM

LinuxQuestions.org > Forums > Linux Forums > Linux - Distributions

All times are GMT -5. The time now is 10:47 AM.

Main Menu
Advertisement
My LQ
Write for LQ
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute content, let us know.
Main Menu
Syndicate
RSS1  Latest Threads
RSS1  LQ News
Twitter: @linuxquestions
Open Source Consulting | Domain Registration