* * * * *

                                    D'oh!

I finally got the Thix [1] filesystem utilities mktfs and tfsck working,
although what I changed to make it work I'm not entirely sure since I wasn't
keeping that close a track of what I was doing. It seemed to go okay after I
went through the mktfs code line by line, seeing the values being calculated
and stored in the superblock of its filesystem.

I had created two partitions on the drive in the laptop—an 8M partition for
swap (if Thix supports it, I'm still not sure) and the rest (~108M) for the
actual filesystem.

Finally I got an 108M (108.0117188 * 1024 * 1024 gives 113,258,496 bytes, so
you see I'm using the computer definition of megabyte, not the disks
manufacturer's definition) image file created, and a few runs through tfsck
fixed it up. Ran gzip over the image, which compressed it down to something
like an 11K file. I transfered it to floppy (tar cf /dev/fd0 thxfs.img.gz),
sneakered it over to the laptop.

I created a Minix filesystem on the 8M partition (using Tom's Root Disk [2]),
extracted the file from the floppy (tar xf /def/fd0) and then extracted the
image file to the appropriate partition(gzip -dc thxfs.img.gz | dd
of=/dev/hda2).

Several long minutes later, it was done. Booted from the Thix installation
disk, it mounted the partition no problem, installed a bunch of stuff, popped
the floppy out and rebooted.

To an error screen. [3]

Ah, the master boot record must be bad. Okay, this is easy. Let me approach
this all wrong and spend an hour or so writing a custom boot sector [4] on a
floppy that will then read the partition table from a harddrive and boot from
that.

It would have worked too, if it weren't for those pesky kids.

Sorry. I would have worked too, if in fact, a boot sector and kernel were
actually part of the partition!

Oops. I should have read the installation instructions better. Especially the
part:

-----[ data ]-----
Go into the Thix source tree (../thix).

Edit  the  file fs/mount.c and  set the  root_device  to  point to the
partition you want to install Thix on. That is, uncomment this lines:

/* /dev/hda3  */
int root_device = HDC_MAJOR * 0x100 + 4;
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

and well, it goes on from there. Had I a bit more time, I probably could do
it. Heck, had I a bit more time, I probably could have gotten Linux on the
thing.

Mark [5] suggested FreeBSD or Slackware. Can't use FreeBSD since I think that
requires a math-coprocessor (although I'm sure Mark will correct me if that
is not the case) and I unfortunately ran out of time to try Slackware (which
probably would work).

I'm out of time, because I'm leaving for Palm Springs in, oh, less than 12
hours now.

[1] http://www.cs.unh.edu/~tudor/thix/
[2] http://www.toms.net/rb/
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:1999/12/15.2
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:1999/12/15/code.txt
[5] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/

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