Bootstrapping Debian on a G-1200s

NOTE NOTE NOTE! This is pre-beta... no guarantees, etc. It might work for you, or it might not. Be ready to hack, tinker, and twiddle. You have been warned.

These instructions should let you set up your G-1200s to boot off of any compatible PCMCIA hard drive. If you want to replace the CD-ROM drive with a bootable IDE drive, you're on your own.

You'll want a separate Linux (or *BSD or Tru64 or Solaris or ...) machine with which you can manipulate mount the PCMCIA hard drive. You'll also want the following:

1. MS-DOS bootstrap: either of these:
   • tarball (about 1.1MB)
   • partition image (about 16MB)
2. Bootstrapped Debian fs archive: root.tar.gz (about 64MB)

Without further ado, here's your E-Z bootstrap procedure:

1. Fire up your setup machine and pop in the PCMCIA drive.
2. Run fdisk on the PCMCIA drive. You want the following partition structure:
   • hdX1 - 16575KB (16MB) - Type 6 (FAT16) Bootable - Bootstrap partition
   • hdX2 - The Rest - Type 83 (Linux) - Root Filesystem
   • hdX3 - 35360KB (34MB) - Type 82 (Linux swap) - Swap Partition
3. Either:
   • (Tarball Method)
     1. Run mkdosfs on partition 1:

        mkdosfs /dev/hdX1
        

     2. Mount the partition:

        mount /dev/hdX1 /mnt -t dos
        

     3. Unpack the tarball and unmount the partition:

        cd /mnt
        tar -xvzf ~/bootstrap.tar.gz
        cd /
        umount /mnt
        

   • (Image Method)
     1. Dump the bootstrap partition image into partition 1:
        (NOTE: hdX1 must be at least 16575K for the image to fit!)

        dd if=bootstrap.img of=/dev/hdX1 bs=512
        

4. Prep the two Linux partitions:

   mke2fs /dev/hdX2
   mkswap /dev/hdX3
   

5. Mount hdX1 and unpack the Debian root fs image:

   mount /dev/hdX2 /mnt -t ext2
   cd /mnt
   tar -xvzf ~/root.tar.gz
   cd /
   umount /mnt
   

The PCMCIA hard drive should now be able to boot to DOS, use loadlin.exe to load the kernel stored in the /dev/hdX1 filesystem, and use the /dev/hdX2 filesystem as the G-1200s system root (/dev/hdc2).

Notes on this setup:

• The image currently posted is an old debian snapshot. You'll want to apt-get update; apt-get upgrade.
• The system as installed has one user account, root with no password. Change this ASAP if you intend to put the machine on any sort of network.
• Do not use LILO. Install new kernels by mounting /dev/hdX3 (type msdos or vfat) and either overwriting vmlinuz or copying the new kernel image to a new filename and altering autoexec.bat.
• A set of common PCMCIA modules are included in the root filesystem, and the card services daemon should auto-load them upon insertion. Once you're live on a network, you should be able to apt-get to your heart's content.