Elks Distribution

Neil Holmes
2002-05-24T13:17:04Z

Hi Everyone,

I have been playing around with Elks for a few months now and have built an
80286 system happily booting and running from its hard drive. The system is
0.1.0 but I have had horrendous problems trying to get through the
fdisk/mkfs/mount stage of the hard disk install. I got there in the end but
I am still not quite sure how. It usually looked ok until I tried to mount
the filesystem. I then got a none minix file system error. I have noticed
that this is not an issue on older releases - for instance 0.0.82.

Are there any fixes around for this that I may be missing ?

As I say. Its running now but I still suffer from the problem elsewhere as I
detail further down.

I have also been playing with Elks in PocketDos on a HP Jornada 690. Not too
far into that yet but all seems to be fine. I haven't got to 0.1.0 here yet.

I have now moved onto looking for some sort of a challenge for myself that I
may be able to contribute to the project. My C skills are not to the
standard of the majority of the contributors here. Hence I am not so
comfortable at low levels. I noticed, though, in the documentation that
Question 1.3 says "Are there any ready-to-run distributions of ELKS". The
answer says no and goes on to invite interest to build something. Is this
still the case ? Are there no distributions ?

During the course of my experimenting I have been playing with scripts that
install ELKS to the hard drive from a root and boot floppy. I guess this is
the start of a distribution ? My current script will only run, so far, into
/dev/bda1. It was devised as a way to save me some time really.

I am currently trying to persuade my script to setup the hard drive to boot.
I did it manually so I expect I will soon have it working from my install
routine too. In due course I may well re-write the script in, perhaps C ? I
would also like to make the Install Floppy Disk be for a 0.1.0 system but
the problems that I outlined at the head of this message prevent that just
now.

Is what I have been up to of interest. Maybe good for less technical people
who want a first look at Elks ?

Have fun ! (I am)

Neil