Re: Re: Re: BDI question and Knoppix plug

Ian has succeeded in pointing to one of the biggest problem with CD based
operating systems. They have to discover the hardware they operate on
each time they boot. This can lead to some disturbing starts if your
hardware is as far of common as mine.

Some of the EMC developers have kicked around the idea of a CD based EMC
but haven't come to any conclusions. I was kinda dreaming that the
zipslack installs onto an MS-OS would allow people to play without having
to create a full dual boot machine.

A CD based real-time kernel should be easy enough but would probably need
to be rtai rather than rtlinux since this is the latest debian distro.
The real-time modules from the EMC should also run since they all run in
shared RAM.

The biggest limitations might be editing and saving ini's although you
could create a bunch of typical machine ini's and their associated run
files. But here again we run into some PC dependence with parameters
like PERIOD. A second alternative would be to create a directory on an
other operating system or on a floppy but this device would need to be
mounted when the CD started up or whenever the EMC started up.

Ray

>    From: "Ian W. Wright" <Ian@...>
> Subject: Re: Re: BDI question and Knoppix plug
>
> Hi,
>
> I have downloaded Knoppix too and have been playing with it for a few
> days. I su it is a bit too 'new' for EMC as yet as I think it uses the
> latest Debian distro and KDE3. I'll have a bit closer look later today.
> I have installed it on a hard disk and I am about to start trying to
> compile a real-time kernel on it - once I have found out how to pass
> boot-time options to the kernel in lilo to make it work with my silly
> old ATI monitor!! (I have to tell it 'vga=normal' and 'screen=1024x768'
> which I can do from a boot disk or the CD but apparently not from the
> boot prompt of the HD installation so I need to get it into lilo
> somehow - any ideas?) The distribution runs great from the CD though a
> bit slow of course and installation to the hard disk - using the
> /usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall script included is a doddle even though
> all the message boxes are in German. I just kept hitting Enter and it
> sorted everything out for me right from partitioning the drive
> automatically. One thing I am not too sure about which might affect EMC
> running on it is that the Knoppix on the CD operates some kind of
> dynamic compression routine which allows them to pack 2GB of
> applications onto a normal CD and still be able to run them directly
> from the CD. I haven't looked closely at the HD install yet but, when
> it is installed there, it seems to be more of a standard Debian version
> - you get a Debian start-up screen and choice of desktop backgrounds
> rather than the Knoppix logo - so this may not use the compression.
> If you can get hold of a copy it's well worth playing with and is a
> really good intro to Linux for the 'dyed-in-the-wool' windoze types and
> there is quite a bit of documentation on the web about modifying the CD
> to run as a demostration system for custom software. I'm sure it would
> be possible for the BDI to be optionally ported to this distro and make
> a really impressive product.
>
> Best wishes,
> Ian