Mail Archives: djgpp/2009/01/13/20:00:50
Hi,
On Jan 13, 4:03 pm, "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_h DOT DOT DOT AT nohavenot DOT cmm> wrote:
> "Rugxulo" <rugx DOT DOT DOT AT gmail DOT com> wrote in message
>
> news:59d15676-685a-4ad8-a43a-7715035abbaa AT f3g2000yqf DOT googlegroups DOT com...
>
> > You're using Win98 and can boot to DOS mode, so just unzip BasicLinux
> > on top of your FAT partition. It's only 20 MB unpacked, so it's not
> > much (only 4 MB or so .ZIP'd). Then just unpack the prebuilt Linux GCC
> > cross-compiler on top of that: "cd / ; tar xvzf /tmp/moss-0.90-bin-
> > linux.tar.gz ; export PATH=/usr/local/i386-moss/bin:$PATH"
>
> Well, that's a no go... with an error saying it couldn't find FS.IMG.
> FS.IMG is there. BASLIN is there. But, I ran it off of a USB flash drive
> using legacy BIOS support. That is likely the problem: lack of legacy USB
> device support in BasicLinux.
Right, I think 2.2.x doesn't support USB. You may have to upgrade the
kernel to 2.4.x. A quick search didn't find one for BL, but it's
probably there somewhere. (BasicLinux claims to be compatible with
Slackware 4.0, too. Maybe they have one.)
> Unfortunately, except for the CD-ROM, I don't
> have any "legacy" physical (by that I mean has "rotating platters") disk
> drives in this machine. The drives I've got all work through modern
> interfaces: USB, SATA. The internal HD is a SATA SSD (no moving parts and
> _exceptionally_ quiet), my other HD is an external USB (likely a normal
> "rotating platters" HD inside...), and the solid-state USB flash drive
> effectively "replaces" the floppy... I've been intending to buy a floppy,
> but I don't have one yet. One solution might be to pull some older hardware
> from another machine, but I'm not motivated to do that.
Well, as mentioned, QEMU + QEMU-IMG + FreeDOS + BasicLinux + FAT12
floppy .IMG to save to (which you can extract files from for DOS)
might work with the pre-compiled i386-moss-gcc. Okay, so that's a
long, roundabout method, but it works. There's also other things (e.g.
Virtual Floppy Drive) for Windows, but not sure if it runs on Win9x.
> I also looked at the Debian windows installer. It, like most Linux
> installs, want's to partition my disks... a definate no-no. If I had a
> physical HD, instead of an SSD, I'd _consider_ defraging it and
> repartitioning. I repartitioned an existing, full-of-data, drive once:
> scary...
Okay, so that might be a bit much, but they say it works. I've never
tried either, so maybe I shouldn't suggest that. ;-) But even
Ubuntu brags about having a Win32 installer now.
> Oh, I'd *love* to have SATA support in Win98SE... So, I have zero intention
> of repartitioning or defraging. What I need is a Linux with a modern
> kernel, 2.6 series, with GCC, Binutils, GLIBC, related compiler tools, and
> Tso's FDISK. It'd need a statically compiled kernel that is compiled for
> loopback on DOS with VFAT, not UMSDOS, and which works with Loadlin. Of
> course, it'd also need support for my devices which are SATA and USB based,
> not IDE or floppy. Due to the way Linux installs today, I'm thinking this
> is an unreal request. In all likelihood, I'd have to install Linux to so I
> can create the needed DOS useable Linux by myself.
I don't know, I'm far from a Linux guru. There are a billion distros,
and most aren't exactly oriented towards DOS-friendliness.
P.S. I did rebuild GCC 2.95.3 (C only) and BinUtils 2.16.1 via DJGPP
for MOSS target, and it seems to work (using /lib/gcc-lib/i386-pc-moss/
2.953/ to hold most everything). I probably organized it wrong, but
for now, who cares. I haven't rebuilt MOSS.EXE yet (and not sure I
can) although I did weakly try (and fail). And as far as binding the
extender to the a.out file, it seems it won't work (MKEXE.SH) because
of lacking "bsdboot.o". You may be able to bind other files to the
a.out itself by using a wrapper linked via ld (see broken script
above), but I haven't tried that. And still no word from Bryan, so I
give up hope on that ....
Anyways, for anybody else's benefit, here's a working binary build of
MOSS / ELF target hosted by DJGPP (GCC + BinUtils + libs + headers +
extender source) w/ 7zdec example as simple testcase. The only thing
this doesn't include is (obviously) the GCC and BinUtils sources,
which I have on my site too. This may expect LFNs due to /i386-pc-
moss/ yet I don't know an obvious way around that yet. But hey, it
works, so use DOSLFN if needed. (I compressed via 7-Zip to save space,
but I did at least add the DOS sfx from Kostylev's 4.58 p7zip compile,
so just rename to .EXE and it should unpack fine, needs 16 MB space,
oh noes!).
http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/moss-dj.7z (3 MB)
http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/gcc2953s.tbz (8 MB, sources only)
http://rugxulo.googlepages.com/bnu2161s.tbz (9 MB, sources only)
P.S. Here's what Bryan's TODO said back then (1996):
* Get rid of some of the stupid hard-coded constants, such as "a.out"
and the remote GDB serial line and enable flag.
* Translation from forward slash to backslash in file operations.
* POSIX-compatible translation for tty-like devices (console, serial
ports, etc.)
* Use EMS pages when available.
* Create a /dev/tty pseudo-file referring to the console.
* Support for loading other executables and other fancy features.
* Native development under DOS.
* Compatibility with DJGPP and/or EMX executables
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