RE: FW: dual sleeves in intimate?

>* James Conner ([email protected]) wrote:
>> All we use familiar for at the moment is kernel, modules and pcmcia
support

>Which seems fine, but it's not really all that simple because all of
>those things then need to be kept in sync between Familiar and Intimate,
>so every time I upgrade the kernel (which I tend to do only through
>Familiar's kernel updates, rather than build my own) I have to make sure
>that Intimate has all the matching kernel modules it is going to need
>later in the boot, or pre-load them while Familiar is still in charge.

BTW... You don't actually need to boot into familiar to upgrade kernels...
You can 'mount /boot' and then chroot a shell in it... Hey presto, you can
mess around with ipkg and the familiar files, whilst you're still running
intimate. (The jffs2 filesystem on /boot is unmounted solely for memory
reasons. If you don't mind loosing a meg of free memory, you could leave it
mounted, and use a symlink for /lib/modules)

What I'd love to see is the two-kernel monte trick working on the iPAQ (used
by the Beowulf people). It's a way of loading one kernel from within another
one... Kind of like using loadlin from dos to get linux started. I believe
however that it's a particularly x86 specific hack, and afaik, no-one's
tried messing with it on ARM machines. Of course, that wouldn't solve the
problem of having two different OSes installed, but it would remove any
dependencies between them.

>Personally I don't mind doing that, upgrading the kernel on my PC
>has accumulated far more nuances, but I'd like to know that an apt-get
>dist-upgrade has really upgraded everything, I'm not going to have to
>reboot into Familiar just to run an ipkg upgrade for kernel/pcmcia. Two
>OSes and two package managers seems a bit much for a little PDA ;)

Personally, I've given up with rolling my own kernels for the iPAQ. I just
can't be bothered to spend the time and effort compiling and debugging the
things... I've just started using the regular familiar relelase versions. At
least I know where I stand with them.

>> don't need familiar on flash... Tho' I have to ask what else you'd put on
>> there.

>Well, I'm coming at this very much from what is probably not an
>especially common point of view - I don't ever take the dual sleeve off
>my iPAQ, so I don't ever have to worry about what it's going to boot
>into without a hard disk. That means I realise you're going to say "nice
>idea, but most people don't see the iPAQ as a portable workstation, it's
>a PDA!" ;)

I'm in exactly the same position myself (as I suspect most intimate users
are). I see my iPAQ as a portable workstation. (mostly is works as a
companion for my laptop, hooked up via USB). I don't think I've had a
filesystem on flash that will start X for over 6 months now.. I just use the
familiar bootstrap images... and that's pretty much it. If you're looking
for something ultra-lightweight to sit on flash, you could have a look at
Disconnect's Kiss distribution. The bootstrap was <2MB last time I looked,
so very quick to flash.

>Anyway, the only improvement (for me at least) I can think of would be
>to have a jffs2 image which basically contains /boot, but with pcmcia
>stuff as well. This would stay mounted after the Intimate root has been
>mounted, much as /boot on a PC would (stuff like the pcmcia packages
>would be installed into that partition and then be symlinked back to
>wherever they would live normally).

Not a problem... Have a look in /etc/rcS.d in intimate... I think the first
thing that runs (S00unmount IIRC) unmounts /boot. If you get rid of that,
you can use a symlink for your lib/modules... but you loose a meg of ram, as
jffs2 stores a lot of filesystem info in ram.

>> You still need a kernel and modules stored on flash, so that rules
>> out CE...  (Unless you plan on booting from CE, which already works...
just
>> without power management).

>I would quite like to see dual-booting become easier, but I have no need
>for Windows in my pocket, so I'll ignore that :)

Same here.. I made some images to start intimate from CE.. more to proove
that it could be done than anything. After that, I got rid of CE as quickly
as possible.

>> Feel free to mess around tho'.. I'd love to see so alternative ways to
boot.

>I'm a long term Red Hat user, so all this Debian stuff is a bit new to
>me. I'll have a play around and see if I can come up with anything.
>Obviously I don't expect it to be used too widely because I suspect most
>people use their iPAQs without sleeves some of the time.

I was a long term RedHat user until I got my iPAQ... rpm had always annoyed
the hell out of me by refusing to install/remove packages etc... I'm much
happier with apt-get/dpkg.. I'm never going back to redhat again. (Sorry
RedHat...)

Jim / Tangent