Victory!

After switching virtual network cards in my hypervisor, I was able to get RH7.1 online.  Textutils compiled as statically linked binaries just as expected, and ran like a mo-f'ing CHAMP on the dettuxx machine.  This allowed me to download coreutils-5.0 and compile/install it.

I ran into another circular dependency with awk (which was a pre-req of upgrading Bash), and was able to cross compile the latest gawk and get it installed just fine via the RH7.1 machine.  Now I'm going to try compiling binutils, as another pre-req of bash, and see what happens... Hopefully I won't have to cross compile too much more.

Several failed attempts...

Apparently, in order to compile textutils, you need to have textutils installed...  Naturally (to me anyway), my first thought was Busybox.  I tried to compile it, no joy (unmet dependancies), I tried the appropriate binaries for my VM, also no joy... insta-segfault.

Fine, let's get the real sort util, and copy it over, perfect!  So I spend the next 20 minutes configuring another (32bit) VM to support SSH1 on the internal network (since, of course, the version of SSH with Dettuxx is ancient), and get scp working.  Copy the binary over, and it crashes complaining about libraries. File confirmed that it was dynamically linked, with libs that weren't installed in Dettuxx, no doubt.  Fine...

export CFLAGS="-static -O2 -g"
./configure --with-prefix=/home/peter/textutils_build
make
make install

This process went along nicely, and generated a statically linked set of textutils bins (the old textutils package wasn't exactly fun to find, mind you).  I scp these binaries over, and get:  "FATAL:  Kernel too old"

As we speak, I have RH7.1 installing in a VM, running a 2.4 kernel out of the box...  Wish me luck...

Back for more...?

So, all these years later, I decided to give DettuxX another try (I mean... we have VM's now... why not), and was able to get it installed, bootable, and on the interwebs last night...  Thats when I remembered just how much of a bitch it is.  I, by some act of God, was able to get gcc compiled, but that's about as far as I got before I started running into... problems.  In order to compile most things, you need to have sort (which was a part of textutils when the distro was released... now textutils has been rolled into coreutils).  Unfortunately, there's a circular dependancy there.  Textutils requires sort to successfully configure, and sort is a part of Textutils...  Guess it's time to evaluate busy box, and the prospect of cross compiling textutils on another machine and copying it over...  Joy...

Goodbye Debian, Hello Hell

Ok... A few quick notes... First off... DON'T do a mkdir /boot accidently, because it wipes the boot directory in the ram disk... bad idea... Beyond that...

Instruction number 8 should read "umount /mnt/mnt" not "umount /mnt"
Instruction number 14 should read "/mnt/bin/lilo -v -C /etc/lilo.conf -r /mnt" not "/mnt/sbin/lilo -v -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf -r /mnt"

Starting over from scratch SUCKS... More soon.

Rediculous...

I really should have noticed that the first disk had a lower block count than the other 7... Bad media right out of the box. Lets try again...

hackserv:/home/proto/Desktop# dd if=dettuxx_disk01.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 100.915 seconds, 14.6 kB/s

Ahhh... much better... now to see if she boots :-P

The first official epic fail.

Well... Disk 1 went into the drive, and away I went with the reboot... The name of this post was supposed to be "Goodbye Debian, Hello Hell", but upon reboot, i recieved

LI_

The activity light on the FDD went out, the cursor was blinking, and lilo never finished the LO and booted... Time to re-dd the disk and see what happens... Not a good start.

dd

Not that anyone really needs to see how the dd command works across all 8 disks, but here you go.

hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk01.img of=/dev/fd0
2847+1 records in
2847+1 records out
1458144 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.165 seconds, 14.4 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk02.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.119 seconds, 14.6 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk03.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.119 seconds, 14.6 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk04.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 102.521 seconds, 14.4 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk05.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.321 seconds, 14.6 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk06.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.518 seconds, 14.5 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk07.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.314 seconds, 14.6 kB/s
hackserv:~# dd if=./dettuxx_disk08.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 101.516 seconds, 14.5 kB/s
hackserv:~#

And for thoes who don't know... A short excerpt from "man dd" (RTFM!)

NAME
dd - convert and copy a file

SYNOPSIS
dd [OPERAND]...
dd OPTION

DESCRIPTION
Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands.