20 Dec 2003

Sat, 20 Dec 2003 01:40:18 -0700

I'm in Virginia on holiday at the moment and have been visiting sights in Washington DC this last few days. The American History Museum has a computer section which is quite good. They have exhibits from the ENIAC to the first Macintosh. The best is surely the Alto which really made my day. None of the machines are on, which is a shame, but the Alto has an image burnt into its CRT which was a bit spooky. I find the whole timeline from the 40s to present day interesting, especially going from a machine like the Alto to machines like the first IBM PC and the Commodore. Well worth a visit.

29 Nov 2003

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 17:24:20 -0700

I had an chance to play with Morphix at work the other day and it is quite an interesting project. I wanted to get Linux up and running quickly on a PC104 system to see what hardware would be detected. The system has got various add-ons. Goran pointed me in the direction of Morphix and it looked ideal to get running from a CF card. Here is roughly what I did. It may not be the ideal or quickest way of doing things but worked ok. I haven't run squeak on it yet but will try that soon.

I had a laptop handy running WinXP Home.

Stuck in the Knoppix 3.3 CD and booted Knoppix

Grab a PCMCIA-CF adaptor and CF card

Used cfdisk to create a partition on the CF card

Used mkfs.ext2 to create a filing system on the partition

download the Morphix base iso and the bare main module onto the ramdisk

mounted the iso using the loop device -> mount -t iso9660 -o loop <iso file> <mount point>

cp -R the contents of the iso onto the CF card.

I didn't really know much about ISO9660 format and looking into it I saw that it contains a boot floppy image that the bios uses to boot the cdrom.

find and mount the floppy image -> mount -t vfat -o loop <file> <mount point>

this contains the kernel and the initial root disk. copy these to /boot on the CF card

I decided to use grub as the boot loader

installed grub on the CF card

point grub at the kernel and the initrd

copy over the main module

unmount everything

whack the CF card in the PC104 system (this is via an IDE-CF converter)

boot

watch Morpix boot

run lsmod and look at the amount of modules it has loaded.

I was really quite impressed. It especially found the video capture hardware I was after.

grub at the moment doesn't have ISO suport but there is a patch floating around and it would be interesting to see what that enables. It would be great to boot an ISO directly because it would mean that you could produce a demo CD and then have it on a variety of media.

as a small linux system (approx 60mb compressed) Morphix seems really good for auto-detecting hardware

that's about as much as I know about Morphix so far.

I can go into more detail if anyone would like to try this out for themselves

I'd love to hear from people who are interested in these kind of things. I'd like to know what other ways there are of having small systems with lots of h/w support. The Morhpix system has interesting properties because it is designed to be read-only and is compressed. You could have a separate partition with the state that you want to maintain for your apps. It wouldn't necessarily be very good if you wanted to keep lots of the side-effects of a running system - like in a server for example. Anyway as far as auto-detection goes it rocks!

I'm going to try the Squeak frame buffer support next.

Cheers, Mike

Squeak People diary for MikeRoberts

20 Dec 2003

29 Nov 2003