[CS-FSLUG] Distribution: Basic Linux 3.2

[Christopher Rose]

Ok, I am going to do something useful. I am posting about a linux distro that I have been tinkering with and now feel that I am ready to report on.

For the last several months I have been trying to find a linux distro that I can use on my laptop. I tried a few CD installs but they didn't work very well once I tried returning the hard drive back to the laptop. I also tried Grey Cat Linux, but as nicely as it worked, there were some concerns. Amongst them was the fact that Grey Cat requires several floppies and it boots from an UMDOS/fat16 filesystem. Hence, though linux, it does not use a linux files system (ext2, ext3, old minix, ect..). Finally I found a distribution that does work quite well in my laptop. That distribution is Basic Linux 3.

This distribution comes in the form of two floppies. The first floppy is boot disk, and the second one contains all the file system information in a *.tgz file. The two disks total about 2.88 MB and yet there is semi-functional gui and busybox (similiar to the bash shell). It can boot to a ram disk or it can be installed. The installation process is pretty easy. Use fdisk to create your partitions (primary, swap, etc..). Then use e2fsck /dev/hda1(2,3,?) to create and ext2 file system and mkswap /dev/hda2 (3,4,?) to create your swap space. then type swapon to activate swap space, the type mount /dev/hda1(or what ever partition you are installing it on) /hd to mount hda1 and then type install-to-hd to install (type yes at prompt). It will ask for disk one and then installs BL3 to the hard drive. After install, reboot the computer and then hit ctrl when you see lilo and then type hd root=/dev/hda1 (or whatever your partition is) and hit enter. Once the hard drive boots, if you want to install lilo, type edit /etc/lilo.conf to remove the # from #boot=/dev/hda1 then press ctrl x to save this and then type lilo -v to install lilo and then reboot the computer again and BL3 should boot up right away without the floppy.

I participate with the BL3 listserv and have learned from them quite a few things about BL3 and I would be glad to share any posts from that listserv if it will help somebody here. One post in particular is about what BL1, BL2, and BL3 are good for. The one thing thing that all three are good for is old 386 and 486 computers that lack the nice little things like CD-ROM, large hard drives, fast processors, etc. Basic Linux is perfect for such machines (my Toshiba WinBook XP being one such machine). There are even some games that can be played on this distro. I haven't been able to play lincity since I upgraded from Red Hat 6 to Red Hat 7.2, but lincity is one such game that is available for BL3 and I do play on my laptop. Now if you need a better kernel, there are two available from the Basic Linux site or you may install a slackware 7.1 kernel. Many of the applications from slackware 4.0 should be able to work with BL3, but you have to also upgrade the glibc files (work in progress for me, need lib.so.6 for xspread and xpdf) Still for what BL3 is, it works quite well. I have no complaints, especially now that my laptop is working. I just need to determine whether I can get the built-in modem to work or if I need to install a 10/100 nic into my machine, then download the slackware files that will allow it to work on my dsl connection, well nothing on this earth is perfect, but I can accept well enough in this case.

Pax,
Christopher

Linux Counter User: #350477
http://www.counter.li.org

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